Tackling a High Bounce Rate- Part One

Tackling a High Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is determined to be high if it is over 75%, however there can be acceptable reasons for a high bounce rate, but a high bounce rate does  require careful review.

What is the Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is recorded for you in Google Analytics by page in the Behavior section > Site Content section, and as a site average on the overview page.

 

Several years ago the average and target bounce rate for a good website was 46.9%. Now with more users on mobile devices, the bounce rate has skyrocketed.

Google states that this drastic change to bounce rate is due in part to the fact that mobile users may start a search on your site and move to a desktop to finish up a review or purchase. Page views have also decreased in this same time period from over 3 or so pages viewed per session to now about 1.5 pages per session – all driven by mobile activity.

Identifying a High Bounce Rate

To address a website’s high bounce rate, knowledge is power.  First, it is important to understand what causes a high bounce rate.

  1. You’ll get a high bounce rate if the page content does not engage the reader. This is a good flag to review your page and consider additions, video, additional links to other information.
  2. You’ll get a high bounce rate if the content is not what the reader was looking for. This is a good flag to review your content, your meta tags, and your paid advertising.
  3. You’ll get a high bounce rate if you supplied the content the reader wanted and they had no need to go further. It is not uncommon to see how bounce rates on articles and blog posts.

What Should You Do Next?

You’ll want to look at the pages that have a high bounce rate score and identify if changes should be done to the content. Check out my Wednesday post this week for the continuation of this art

Marketing Trends to Watch: Amazon Advertising

Google announced that earnings from Google Ads had dropped this last quarter. Feeling pressure from newbies on the block, like Amazon, is sure to shakeup the Google Boardroom.

Google Ads has been king – that is until recently. With renewed pressure from Bing Ads – now called Microsoft Advertising – which appears structured to expand in unknown marketing arenas, Amazon is also now strongly entering the pay per click platform mix.

Amazon has an accredited professionals program and I will be starting my training this week. Not only has Amazon changed the way we buy online, but it may now be the biggest contender against Google for the e-commerce pay per click dollar.

Have you seen this yourself, you are looking to buy a product and now do not even go to Google, but rather start your search on Amazon? I am doing just this myself. Do I click on the Amazon Sponsored items – you bet I do as usually they are a great deal and the price is right. Add to that free prime shipping and Amazon is rapidly becoming my shopping search engine. I rarely buy now items on Google.com – and only if I cannot find it on Amazon.

Amazon has tested services too, so they are just not all about selling products. I have seen cleaning services and pest control service programs on Amazon. Tie that in with the super smart Alexa devices and app that are becoming assistants of choice in millions of homes and Google should be worried.

Incorporating Social Media Into Your Internet Marketing Strategy

Incorporating Social Media Into Your Internet Marketing Strategy

In the eyes of many business owners the value of social media is shrinking. Does that mean that you should move out of posting to your blog, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?

It depends on where your audience is and how active your followers are. Although you may never be able to say that you got a lead from Twitter, there may still be value to your business and brand by posting on the Twitter platform.

For most businesses, I like LinkedIn posting, for news and information I like Twitter, and to connect with and announce promotions to consumers, I like Facebook.

Each platform has a unique use for your business, but when the value stops, it is time to look carefully at where you invest your time and money and make sure that your investment still makes sense.

If you need help with social media or analyzing which platforms are the best fit for your business and audience consider our services to provide a honest opinion and quality content.

The Role of Social Media on Your Website: If You’re Not Using It- Lose It

The Role of Social Media on Your Website: If You're Not Using It- Lose It

Social media is about connecting. One of my pet peeves is for business websites to have social media icons to various platforms, but they have not updated them for months or sometimes years.

My rule is, if you are not using it – lose it!

We all have our favorite social media accounts to use and some of us will use more than others, but if you are going to have the icon on your website, you should try to do one update a week and at the minimum of once a month. If you cannot keep on top of that consider farming out your social media updates to an employee or contactor.

When you are operating in a competitive market, social media interaction may be the one thing that helps differentiate you from your competitors. Especially if you are providing value to users in the things you are doing on social media.

It does not have to be difficult to keep your platforms updated. You can use an application like Hootsuite or Sendible to schedule, repeat, and save updates to reuse. In fact with Hootsuite, you can even send the same update to multiple profiles with one click.

Don’t make things hard for yourself, boost traffic and engage clients with the smart use of social media.

 

Why You Should Move To HTTPS

HTTPS – Google loves it, but for informational websites, moving to HTTPS adds to your costs. Expect to pay $129 to $229 for a SSL or secure socket layer certificate to be able to have your website use HTTPS in the browser bar.

For me at this time, I am not moving to HTTPS and it is mainly due to the additional cost. I do not have e-commerce on my website and I only use a contact form for prospects, so do not feel that I must have this extra security. But, Google loves the security and encryption that HTTPS affords for websites. At some point in time, the use of HTTPS on your website may be a ranking factor for organic results, but for now, it is not.

E-Commerce Sites MUST be HTTPS

If your website has e-commerce, you take payments or log users into a secure area, you really need to be using HTTPS at this point in time, no exception.

New Websites Should Embrace HTTPS

Any new websites we design are all in HTTPS. At this time I do not feel that existing informational websites should move to HTTPS, but that day may be coming soon.

To find out more about how we can help you, I invite you to visit our website to browse our service offerings and read more content on topics that will help your business grow.

What Chat App Is Best For Your Site?

The Role of Social Media on Your Website: If You're Not Using It- Lose It

Seems simple, just install code and you’ve got a chat app. But not so fast. I am finding out from personal experience that not all chat apps are alike.

I started out with Drift and still have that chat app on my website. What I found as I used the app was it slowed my website to a crawl for load time. I think much of this is the code is installed in the head tag as instructions state, but may be better installed before the ending body tag </body>.

What is happening on my site is the page is taking so long to load and the navigation does not operate until the chat app function appears – I consider this very bad. Drift must have made a code change to the asynchronous code recently as the page load time was not an issue before but started about two weeks ago.  As a result I have been actively looking for a website chat app replacement.

I have tried three Tawk.toMyLiveChat, and now Pure Chat. I am using Pure Chat on my website right now and so far I do like the free version. What I consider important for a website chat app are the following:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Able to configure colors
  3. Has a rock solid mobile app
  4. Does not impact page load speed

So far Tawk.To and My Live Chat  were too complicated for my needs and cumbersome to use.  Pure Chat has easy set up and I do like the mobile app which is simple to use.