Your website’s bounce rate is an indicator of how your website impacts viewers at first glance – do they stay or do they go?

If your bounce rate is high, take a closer look at your website design, content, and usability in order to improve your user experience. As you make changes you’ll likely be rewarded with increased conversion rates as well as reduced bounce rates.

With that in mind, here are five elements we look to correct when we’re analyzing a website or a page with a high bounce rate:

Ineffective Content

Your web content should follow through on any promises made in your PPC ads, website name, or keywords.

If you promise advice on fixing gutters, but only provide sales copy for your gutter cleaning services, you’ll have a high bounce rate.   In addition to delivering on your promises, make sure your copy is well written and has been edited for spelling and grammar errors.

Keyword Stuffing

It’s annoying to read a paragraph that uses the same keywords or phrases twenty-eight times in a row, especially if the copy doesn’t provide any useful information in between the keywords. This particular practice of repeating the same keywords again and again is known as keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is a losers game, Not only are the search engines getting much smarter about not rewarding this type of behavior,  but visitors hate it and will bounce off your site.

Slow Load Time

You’ve got less than 5 seconds to get the majority of your page content in front of your viewer’s eyes. If it takes longer than that for your page to load, most visitors are already gone.

You can speed up your load time by using cascading style sheets, removing unnecessary or overly complex animations and images, keeping pages relatively short, and keeping table use to a minimum.

Not Designed for Usability

Your bounce rate will be high if:

• Your website is difficult to navigate
• It doesn’t provide clear direction on how the visitor can easily get to the page(s) they’re interested in
• It doesn’t present clear calls to action

Make it easy for users to do, what they want to do, by keeping actions simple and obvious.  Remember you can’t make your visitors buy, or sign-up or contact you.  But you can make it easy  for them to do it, once they’re ready to move forward.

Ineffective Design

Colors, white space, animations, and layout all contribute to effective website design. Be on the lookout for:

• Harsh colors that hurt the eyes.
• Too much, too little, or ineffectively placed white space
• Little singing spiders that follow the visitor down the page, music that starts playing the moment the visitor hits the home page, or talking images that the visitor can’t control … any potentially annoying design elements that are out of the visitors control

All of the above elements can create an user experience that will send visitors bouncing off to other sites.

Keeping visitors on your site really just requires an understanding of their needs and desires.  A high bounce rate is not a permanent condition.  It’s something you can improve, page by page, on your website.

Want a Free Idea for improving your Bounce Rate? Give us a call, we’re up to the challenge.

How do you really know what things are most important to your audience, and what will be the easiest and most appealing for them to use? You can find out about this through user testing. Testing will let you know what does and doesn’t work about your website, and what is distracting or misleading for your visitors.

Usability testing consists of showing your website to possible users and asking t them to perform some common tasks while noting where they run into trouble.

From there, it is your task to try and fix the problems that testing demonstrated without creating any more—which can become quite the juggling act! For this and other reasons, testing needs to be an integrated part of your website planning and design. It is definitely not a last minute operation to try and eliminate all the usability issues that a website has. It is important to note that although things may seem perfectly obvious and navigable to you, you have been working on it since its inception. Your high level of familiarity with the site will make you a biased observer.

How do you test? There are a lot of different ways. With time and available funds, you can hire a professional to design and run tests for you. This is, of course, the best way to use testing to its fullest potential. However, oftentimes you may not have the resources available for this sort of testing. This is where quick and dirty form of user testing shines. It is a lot less thorough and precise than traditional testing, but it will work to identify the major usability problems present in your site.

Most of what testing takes is time and patience. You need to be able to watch someone attempt to use your website without interfering or giving directions. The entire point is to find out where they get stuck or confused, not to get them through the task of locating a product info page. You can feel free to avoid fixing minor problems that only cause a momentary pause in site usage; what you need to focus on are the big problems. These range from problems in navigation to something so basic as being able to tell from a glance what the site is all about.

User testing is an essential task of designing a website that is user-friendly, which avoids making anyone think.

Two very helpful websites, where you can learn more about usability, are:

Advanced Common Sense

User Interface Engineering

Businesses are flocking to social media venues in an effort to increase exposure and gain new customers. For many, their efforts are paying off in the form of increased visitors and new sales. On the flip side, however, many businesses are also experiencing a drop in conversion rates after entering the social media world.

How to Improve Conversion

Why? They’ve increased their volume of viewers without targeting the message, resulting in a higher bounce rate, and many more people who aren’t finding what they expected to find. You can improve conversion with social media by keeping the quirks of the system in mind as you design your landing pages.

●      Use descriptive posts. When you post something on Facebook or Twitter, make sure you’re specific in your descriptions. Don’t post “Check out our new product here!” You might get thousands of clicks, but you’ll also get thousands of bounces. To improve conversion with social media, post “Check out our new gps tracking watch here!” instead. That way, the people who click will be the ones interested in gps tracking watches.

●      Optimize landing pages. In order to improve conversion in social media, you need landing pages that deliver on viewer expectations. Your headline should work hand in hand with the social media post the viewer just saw, and your brand should be immediately evident. Make it easy for visitors to figure out what you want them to do, whether it’s sign up for a newsletter, enter a sweepstakes, or give feedback.

●      Give away products rather than gift certificates. When you hold a giveaway through Facebook, offer a product, your own or someone else’s rather than a gift card. Why? People looking to make a purchase will most likely wait until they find out whether they’ve won the gift card before they buy. By the time the winner is announced, the other thousand entrants may have forgotten you completely. Offering a product, especially someone else’s product (like an iPad) makes it more likely that people signing up for a contest on your site will click around and consider an immediate purchase.

●      Offer perks for repeat customers. If a viewer knows that you give discounts or free merchandise to people who make additional purchases, they’ll be more likely to buy from you in the first place. Make it worth your viewers’ while to stay on your page and choose you from among your competitors.

Don’t get discouraged if your conversion rates drop during the beginning of your social media campaign. It could just mean that your efforts to increase traffic are working. But as you delve further into your social media strategy, make sure you work to improve conversion with social media by targeting some of the specific conversion problems that social media venues generate.

Need some ideas for getting more out of your social media effort?  Give us a call

Why don’t more visitors respond to the calls to action on your website?  This question came up recently, so, I took a journey in the wayback machine to see how I handled it in my previous life as a stockbroker.

As a stockbroker, I never, ever asked prospective clients for the order.  I asked enough questions to get them talking and shut up.  Then I provided answers to their questions, and enough information, until the prospective client said some version of, “What’s next?” I didn’t make the ‘close’, they did.

Conversions Occur In the Mind’s of your Visitors

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments makes a brilliant observation, “Conversion doesn’t occur on the website, it occurs in the mind of the visitor”.  This is exactly what happened when my prospective client said, “What’s next?”  I hadn’t sold him, or her, anything.  Conversion had occurred in their minds.  When they said, “What’s next?” they had sold themselves.

Billboards, Commercials and Calls to Action

So what, then, is a Call to Action?  Are you really ‘calling them to action’?  Are you asking for the order?  You are, but, until conversion has occurred in the mind of the prospect, or visitor, your call to action is just another billboard along the highway.  You can call them to action all you want to, but until they want to know “What’s next?” they are fast-forwarding through your commercial.

Calls to Action do Work

So, do you still need calls to action?  Absolutely.  They must be available when the visitor is ready.  This is when “Add to Cart”, your telephone number, the email signup is critical.  When the visitor thinks, “What’s next?” your call to action must be right there.  It must be simple, visible and most importantly, available.

Don’t kid yourself that you are ‘closing’ anyone.  Your visitors close themselves.  Your job is to get on their wavelength and make that as simple as possible.

I bet you know how to cheer for your favorite team.  Whether that cheer is as simple as chanting a batter’s name during a baseball game, or as involved as a singing and dancing team cheer at summer camp, we all know the powerful feeling of lifting our voices and letting everyone know what’s important to us.

.What’s the Differentiator?

Just like a cheer identifies what’s important to you at a rally or ball game, a unique value proposition identifies what’s important about your online business.  Let’s face the challenge: most of us with online businesses have entered a market that was crowded before we got there.  It’s like we set up a lemonade stand at the end of our driveway only to realize that all our neighbors had set up their lemonade stands and opened for business hours ago.  Unless you can tell passers-by what makes your lemonade stand unique, you can’t expect them to buy from you.  If you can prove that your business stands out, you have a great chance to increase online sales.

Identify Unique Strengths

Unless you have a remarkably unique business, you’ll need to spend some time on formulating a unique value proposition.  Sure, the essence of a dog food sales site might be “we sell great dog food,” but that’s not going to catch anyone’s attention or increase online sales.  Here are some tips for crafting your unique value proposition.

Sit back and spend some time thinking about your company’s unique strengths.  Look for something that you provide that no one else does.  If you have the only lemonade with fresh, hand-picked lemons, make sure people know that.

Use Surveys

Use a survey to find out why your customers chose you.  Sometimes we look at our own sites so much, we miss the obvious.  If you know why some people choose your site, you’ll probably increase online sales by making sure every one knows that reason to choose you.

Aim for the top.  It’s not enough to have great prices, great selection, and great service.  Focus on an area where you are the best on the market.

Craft A Catchy Value Proposition

Once you know what makes you unique, develop that into a brilliant, catchy statement that will grab a visitor’s attention!  If you want to increase your conversion rate, give your visitors a powerful reason to shop your site.  Craft a unique value proposition to hold their attention and increase online sales.

Have you taken a good look at your website lately? Not just by uploading new content or adding products.  I’m talking about really looking at your layout, navigation, and content as though you had never seen them before.

Increasing your conversion rate requires a pleasing website visitor experience that will easily lend itself to finding information and taking action.

What Do Your Visitors Need?

Let’s take an example. Imagine that you own a zoo. You’ve got some fantastic animal exhibits that you really believe your community will enjoy and appreciate. But there are no signs showing them where the various animals are. There is no shade and no benches. You don’t offer concession stands or even a drinking fountain. When visitors need help, workers are nowhere to be found.

No one wants to visit a zoo like that, no matter how great the exhibits are. If there are no considerations for helping visitors have an enjoyable experience, the attractions won’t be enough to draw in the crowds.

The same is true for your website. In order to increase conversion rates, you not only have to provide a superior product, but also a superior website visitor experience. Otherwise, you’ll lose the majority of your audience before you get a chance to convince them.

Improve your Visitor’s Experience

With that in mind, here are a few ideas that will help you improve your website visitor experience.

●      Search box—If you don’t have one, add one. It’s frustrating to know exactly what you’re looking for but to have no idea where to look for it. Add a search feature and make sure it returns accurate results.

●      Navigation—Put navigation bars on the top of the page or at the sides, adjacent to the content where they will be easily visible. Put a linked logo in the upper left hand corner so visitors can easily get back to your homepage from anywhere on the site.

●      Payment Information—Answer these four questions as early on your site as possible: How do I make a purchase? Where do I go to pay? What payment methods are accepted? What is the total cost, including shipping?

●      Layout—Make sure each element of your layout is pleasing to the eye. Go easy on the use of flashy animations, which can also slow your load time. Choose colors that complement each other and that lead the eye toward your call to action. If you’re not using cascading style sheets (CSS), make the switch as soon as possible in order to improve the ease of navigation throughout your site.

●      Contact—Make it easy for visitors to contact you and when they do, reply as soon as possible. Why ruin an otherwise great visitor experience by failing to answer questions or reply to comments in a timely manner.

Visitors who enjoy using your website are more likely to become regular customers and recommend your products or services to their friends.

Time to Name Names…

What websites, do you know of, that provide an exceptional customer experience? What makes the experience special for you?

According to BizRate, 75% of online shoppers have exited a website at least once during the past three months after adding items to the shopping cart, but without completing a purchase. This statistic is known as shopping cart abandonment.

At first glance, it may seem like there’s not much an e-commerce retailer can do to improve their cart abandonment rate. After all, how can you control whether the shopper’s dog needed to go out just then, or his daughter who is in the Army called right before he hit the checkout button?

Tips for Improving Your Cart Abandonment Rate

In reality, however, most customers who abandon online shopping carts do so because they became frustrated with the site in some way. They could not find the information they were looking for, or the checkout process was too cumbersome.

Reduce Frustration Factors

If you’ve ever shopped on a website that consistently sent you back to the home page after adding an item to your cart, requiring you to wade back through pages of merchandise before finding the page you were looking for, then you know how easily frustration can cause you to give up.

Make it your goal to reduce frustrating elements of your site such as making it difficult to find what they want, requiring them to jump through hoops in order to edit the shopping cart, or making it impossible to remove an item from the cart without emptying it entirely.

Improve Website Usability

Cater to your customers by making information easily available and navigation simple and straightforward.

Make sure items displayed on your website are in stock or that they are clearly marked as being out of stock before the customer begins to check out.

Display shipping and other fees at the beginning of the checkout process so a customer isn’t caught off guard.

Give first time customers an option to check out as a guest without registering, keeping in mind that a happy, unregistered customer will be more likely to shop with you again than will a frustrated, registered customer.

Simplify the Checkout Process

Once customers have found all the items they want to buy, they want to hand over their payment information as quickly as possible while still being reassured that their information is secure.

Keep the checkout process simple, require as few steps as possible, and give the customer several options including both payment by credit card and by PayPal or Google Checkout.

Display security symbols at checkout so customers know that you value their privacy and that their information will be protected.

As you seek to improve your shopping cart abandonment rate, keep the customer in mind at all times. Determine what will make the checkout and payment process as quick, easy, and painless as possible.

If you keep your customers happy, they’ll not only complete that purchase, but they’ll also return to you again and again.

Improving the conversion rate on your website doesn’t have to mean weeks of testing and redesigning. You can make positive changes to your website resulting in increased conversions by spending a few minutes each day baby stepping  into conversion optimization.

Crawl First

Before you start changing things on your website, make sure you have a good understanding of where you are already and that you’ve made a commitment to improvement.

If you want to have a top notch website, you’ll need to evaluate and improving on a regular basis to make sure things still work the way they should.

Improving your website will involve gathering information with an analytics tool and using the results to show you where you need to make changes.

Use your analytics tool to determine  things like unique visitors per day, top landing pages, bounce rate, and goal conversions. Use this information to determine which areas of your site operate effectively and which ones could use some help.

Stand Up and Get Ready

As you baby step into conversion optimization, your next move should be to figure out which page needs improvement the most.

Use your analytics data to choose just one page—perhaps your top landing page or the page with the highest bounce rate—and to discover which elements on that page need work.

Have someone else look at the page and tell you what they find frustrating or difficult about its navigation, content, call to action, or layout.

One Step at a Time

Your personal observations, and insights from external observers will probably overlap in some areas. Choose one of the areas that repeatedly gets flagged as a problem and change it.

If your goal is to baby step into conversion optimization, don’t try to change too much at once or you’ll get bogged down. Instead, change one element, and then see how that change affected your results.

If the page under consideration still has a high bounce rate, try changing another element. If it has drastically improved, move on to another page.

Choosing to baby step into conversion optimization is not about haphazardly picking items from your website and changing them to see what will happen. Instead, it’s about defining an overall goal, determining what steps you can take that will advance you the furthest towards that goal, and implementing the steps one at a time so that you don’t get overwhelmed in the process.

Small steps add up to big changes and before you know it, you’ll be looking at a stellar website.

Want to read more on conversion optimization?

4 Tips to Improve your Calls to Action

4 Tips to Increase your Website’s Conversion Rate

One of the best books I’ve ever read on website usability was written by Steve Krug, called “Don’t Make Me Think .  I had read it once before the Conversations on Website Conversion Book Club started reading it this July, but I’ve gotten even more out of it the second time through.

In many areas of life, thinking is very important. Thinking before you speak, thinking before you act, thinking through a problem to get to a solution…these are just a few of examples of how thinking helps us.  So why is it so important to design a website so that people don’t have to think?

Because every time you make a visitor think, you’ve interrupted their train of thought. Most people are concentrating hard to solve a problem. When your website confuses or frustrates them, you’re interrupting their mission and forcing them to think. Since no one particularly likes to be forced to do something, you risk losing them to a website that is easier for them to use.

Visitors come to your website to accomplish a mission. They don’t want to be confused, frustrated, or made to think about what something means.  On the web, we all like things to be simple, easy and obvious.

Carl and I made the following video to explain some common website mistakes that we’ve been seeing on the website’s we’re reviewing.

The toy store at the mall in my childhood home town was brilliant.  They had a big display of popular toys right out front where every kid could come by and play with them.

A child who sees his favorite toy on the shelf gets excited, but a child who has that toy in his hands can be downright persuasive!  That toy store increased sales by encouraging interaction.

You can do the same thing for your online store. You can increase visitor engagement with social media.Your goal is to make your site as interesting as possible to your visitors, especially through social media.  Most people can’t go a day without checking Facebook.  How can you make your site interesting to them?

Here are some helpful suggestions for increasing your visitor engagement with social media.

Add Social Media Links and Widgets

Put links on your site so that visitors can instantly share, like, tag, subscribe, or tweet the page they’re viewing.  Sure, some people know how to use their own programs or copy and paste links by hand, but you’re not interested in making things difficult, are you?

By putting the icons and links on each page, you make it easy for even novice social media users to be engaged with your site.

Blog as Frequently as Possible

Don’t write blog posts that overtly advertise your products, just blog. Why give people some free bit of information related to your sales niche without forcing a “buy stuff” link into every article?

Because, people will come back for free information.

They’ll share links to good blog articles and send their friends to your site.  That’s the whole point of visitor engagement with social media: your visitors voluntarily sending people to your site.

Give to Get

Devote time to interaction with your visitors, followers, friends, and subscribers.  Are people commenting on a Facebook post about your product?  Make a useful comment of your own.

People will often ask questions in their comments; you should be there with helpful answers.  Think of interactive questions and post them to your followers.  Initiate and contribute to discussion.

It’s your job to give your visitors opportunities to interact with you.  If you can maximize visitor engagement with social media, you can build a network of people who enjoy interacting with you and your site.

That’s advertising that will grow on its own for free.

Additional Resources:

Is Your Social Media Program Delivering the Goods?

Using Social Media: Integrating Videos into your Website