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Archive for March, 2011

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SEM Strategy: Bounce rates (Part 3- How to deal with high bounce rates.)

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Continuing from our last post, is what an online business’ search engine marketing person should do with bounce rates. One of the first things we recommend is double checking the numbers. One simple way you can do is is to check on your exit pages.

As a quick test, visit the Content section of Google Analytics and check the “Top Entry” and “Top Exit Pages.” At first glance you should make sure your top entry, exit and landing page (your main page, for example) are the same one. Next, you should check and see your “entry ratio” and “exit ratio,” by comparing the entry and exit numbers to the total number of visits, just like you would with bounce rates. These new ratios might give you a better indication of how your users behave on that particular landing page.

Now what? Our recommendation would be to drill further down into your research and look into the Entrance Paths and Entrance Keywords (both found on the main dashboard of reports). With these two reports you can see where your users are coming from, and see what keywords they are using in the search engines to find your website business. If the landing page your users are coming to does not match up with the keywords they’re using, then there’s a good possibility your bounce rates are being caused by that, in part. Optimize your titles, content, description and meta tags to reflect what you actually have, or include the content your users are looking for on your landing page, and see if that helps.

Up next, two simple ways to improve bounce rates, and two simpler ways to track your numbers.

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SEM Strategy: Bounce rates (Part 2- How high is too high?)

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

When you, or your search engine marketing person gets the first overall look at your SEO analytics, one of the first set of numbers that pops up is the bounce rate. In our last post, we defined bounce rates, and how they differed from exit rates (they’re the measure of the landing page), so now we will continue with defining what bounce rates mean to a SEO person, and how they can find out deeper insight into these metrics.

In this series, we will use the Google Analytics reporting tool, since it is free and available to anybody who registers a website, it is the easiest place to start, If you are paying for search engine marketing, then they company you are getting the software from should be generating these reports and sugestions of improvement for you.

According to Google Analytics specialist, Avinash Kaushik, “…My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis….” Since he is one of the industry leaders in SEO analytics, we believe his observation is a good place to start from. To be on the conservative side, if you are looking at your reports for the first time, and your bounce rates are between 45-50% you should recognize that as a red flag.

In order to get deeper insight into your bounce rates, you should run a full bounce rate report, by going to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rates. This will give you a daily breakdown of your bounce rates within a specific time frame. Up next- What to do about your bounce rates, and how to make sure they sync up to your exit rates, and the actual behavior of your online business’ users.

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SEM Strategy: Bounce rates (Part 1- What are they and how do you get them?)

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

One of the first things a search engine marketing person is confronted with on a website business’ analytics is the bounce rate. This term is sometimes confused with “exit rate,” even by SEO people, so, in this four-part series about bounce rates and improving them for your online business’ organic traffic, we are going to define this term and what it means to your Internet marketing business strategy.

First, bounce rates are defined as a percentage. If you take the total number of people that visit the landing page of a website and then “bounce” (leave immediately), and divide that by the total number of people who visited the website, you have the bounce rate.

The important part of this definition is where they bounce from—the LANDING page. This separates the definition from that of “exit rates” which is a similar ratio, only, it measures the percentage of people who click away to a different website from a specific page (whatever that page may be), after having clicked around the website for a minute or two.

To summarize by example, a bounce rate is when someone clicks on your website, looks at the main page and says “oh, no, this isn’t what I want” and clicks out, vs. a person who gets to your homepage, maybe types in a search query, finds a page in the search results, clicks on it, or maybe clicks to a different page in your search results and THEN leaves your page. If a particular page on your website has higher-than-average exit rates—that’s a problem, but not as big of one as your bounce rate, especially if it’s high.

Stay tuned to the next post, about what constitutes a “high” bounce rate.

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SEM Strategy: Reputation—Does your SEO person have one? (Part 2)

Monday, March 28th, 2011

So, if you’re in the process of taking your online business to the “next level” or you are looking for a smarter way to improve your Internet website marketing strategy, then you need to find an SEO/SEM person or agency that has an excellent reputation. For the small businesses, we strongly emphasize the need to thoroughly interview and investigate the person you are going to entrust with your online business’ brand reputation. While it’s not necessarily true that you need to spend thousands of dollars for the best search engine marketing person, you should be suspicious of any SEM person that promises to give you incredible results for a bargain.

Here’s an all-too-familiar SEO horror story- A small business owner, fairly ignorant of SEO and SEM, decided his website needed to rank #1 was of them spending an easy $2-5k on a company that promised to “improve their organic traffic.” The shady SEO/SEM company takes their money, and sends out the link to an overseas site that link spams the company’s website to hundreds of sites, or puts it up on a personal domain that’s really just a link farm. When the shady SEO is dinged by the search engine crawlers and fined, they take down the links, and charge the small business to do it all over again. Meanwhile, the search crawlers are associating the small website business with spam, and its Internet reputation is slowly getting destroyed.

So, in investigating your potential SEO person, you need to see examples of how they’ve worked in the past. They should provide you step-by-step procedures, solid SEO analytics and numbers of how these procedures impacted the website business, and they should have local references (more than one). If they happen to be new to the industry, you might not want to take a chance on them, unless they seriously prove they have skills, but lack professional experience. Finally, before they leave your interview, you should also ask them what they consider “black hat” SEO and how they avoid it. Basically, like any employee you are bringing into your company, investigate your SEM person thoroughly, and when you’re convinced you have a solid person, hire them.

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SEM Strategy: Reputation—does your SEO person have one? (Part 1)

Friday, March 25th, 2011

As your online business grows you need a capable search engine marketing and SEO person to handle the reputation of your brand online. Even the most unintentional of online forays can lead to disaster, so it requires someone who has enough experience and enough practical sense to handle what basically amounts to online public relations.

But what reputation does your search engine optimizer have?

Unfortunately, the SEM industry is not currently regulated, so anybody can do it. Search engine marketing can get complex, the more you start looking at the details, but it’s easy enough for a scammer to pass off as a knowledgable search engine optimizer just because it’s a relatively new industry and most people don’t know much about it. The industry experts, apart from the folks who actually created the search engines and their algorithms, are mostly people with excellent knowledge of the industry and markets surrounding search engine companies. Using their knowledge, they have made websites work from years of trial and error.

There are others, who just instinctively have an awareness of how people behave online, but even those SEO folks start using or creating some kind of process, and will rely on their peers to find innovative ways to build organic rankings. While the entire SEO/SEM industry needs regulating, it isn’t now, so you need to be smart about your hiring choices. Before you throw your money away on any search engine marketing company (even one that’s been highly recommended by someone you trust) we’re here to make sure you do your homework and find a reputable SEM/SEO person to increase your online business’ brand reputation.

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