Getting Started with Bounce Rate

A big thanks to Tanya for inviting me to contribute.

As an Internet startup founder, I'm constantly thinking about how to grow my web traffic. One of the tools I can't live without is Google Analytics. Installing it is the easy part, making sense of all the data is not. One little gem I came across recently is understanding bounce rate.

In a nutshell, the bounce rate indicates how many visitors landed on your site and left instantly. In other words, it tells you how well the source sending you traffic is matched to the visitors landing page on your site.

Here's a quick overview to get started using this handy metric. From within Google Analytics, select All Traffic Sources under the Traffic Sources option. For the data to be more useful, change the Show Rows option at the bottom of the table to 500.

What you're looking for is high Visits with a low Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic and visitors are sticking around to check out your site. The opposite is also very helpful but certainly not as encouraging. Look for high Visits with a high Bounce Rate. This means a site is sending you lots of traffic but the visitor is completely not interested in what they see.

I sort first by Bounce Rate in the last column to check for high visits/low bounce rates then sort by Visits to scan for high visits/high bounce rates.

This led me to some obvious conclusions but seeing cold, hard data made the point. Sites focused on areas related to my site send the best traffic, that is lots of visitors with a low bounce rate. At the other spectrum were the search engines, Google and Yahoo. Lots of traffic but a very high bounce rate. This means users are finding me through the search engines and hate my landing page or don't find my site useful for their search terms. The bulk of the good traffic (decent visits with a lower bounce rate) were blogs where the blog author did a write-up about my site. You'll likely be surprised by some of the sites that send you a fair amount of traffic with a low (ie, good) bounce rate.

At a glance, this tells me the gold mines are the sites focused on topics specifically related to my site followed by bloggers. As for the search engines, this is where I really need to work on my landing page and understand what search terms send visitors my way. I can change the landing page then check the bounce rate again to see if that interests more visitors.

There are many more insights and conclusions to be had with Bounce Rate but just dive right in now and get started with the basics.

New Website Launch | Africa-in-Focus.com

We have launched the new website for Africa in Focus this week!

Africa in Focus provides overland tours into Africa for a more discerning clientele. While providing quality overland tours, there is a strong focus on African photography with the inclusion of photographic workshops on certain tours.

The new website features photographs taken on their expeditions into Africa, and provides a sense of the experience one might have on a tour. Overland packages range from a 14 day tour around Nairobi though to a 55 day expedition from Nairobi to Cape Town via Victoria Falls.

Other website features includes a number of photographic sections and a tour of the expedition vehicle , which is apparently the best in Class for African over landing.

We wish them great success with their new website and look forward to the opportunity to work with them in the future.

New Client | MultiFix.co.za

We would like to welcome a new client Multi Fix, and mention that we look forward to the challenge of redesign their existing website.

Multifix has a extensive hardware product range, which includes quality fasteners such as Heller masonry drills, Unifix fixings, Wera screwdriver bits, Multifix chemical mortars and many more related fasteners.

Their extensive product catalogue will be available online shortly.

AdWords: Click Through vs. Conversion Rates

A common misconception for AdWords newbie’s is that a high Click Through Rate (or percentage) is a positive result. One has the sense that people are legitimately interested in your products and yes, business is going to boom soon.

That might indeed be the case in certain instances, but in most cases there are a few important calculation that when applied usually put matters into context. The litmus test is always the conversion rate; put simply, the number of people who actually end up buying your product. Since AdWords is really just a modern direct marketing (DM) tool, I find it worth while to apply the old school DM calculations.

First up, Cost per Enquiry: Your Advertising Spend divided by the number of Enquiries over a period of time. To over simplify; if you spent R1000 on Google AdWords and received 20 enquiries, your cost per enquiry is R50. This is an interesting calculation when comparing various media formats, but for me it is not really that revealing.

The real value lies in Cost per Conversion: Advertising spend divided by the number of sales concluded over a period of time. Using the same R1000 advertising spend, if only 4 of the 20 enquiries where converted to sales, the cost per sale would be R250 (R1000 divided by 4).

I mention these simple calculations to illustrates the importance of Relevance when selecting keywords. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful a business will be. Being specific when selecting keywords is a effect way of obtaining high quality enquiries and therefore achieving a higher conversion rate. A practical keyword example of this is “Accommodation in Cape Town” a string of keywords which covers many types of accommodation over a vast geographical area. It also happens to be a very competitive category with every new guesthouse thinking that paying for that number one ranking is going to launch them into the big time. With a campaign targeting the AdWords top spot for this search string, it will be very easy to achieve high click through rates, while running up a huge AdWords bill. Apply the Cost per Conversion formula and it will soon reveal that this strategy is not sustainable over the long term.

There are many factors that should be considered when determining the correct AdWords strategy to adopt. Staying with “Accommodation in Cape Town”, experience has shown me that it is much more effective to sponsor a particular type of accommodation in a certain suburb, and perhaps to even mentioning a price in the content to further assist in filtering results – if you see it as a big deciding factor. For example sponsoring “Self Catering Accommodation Camps Bay” would achieve much lower Cost per Conversion as it will attract highly relevant shoppers. While you might achieve far less clicks on your advertisement, they will be of a very high quality. This might be one successful permutation of a number of possible keyword options. Others could include "Rent Flat Camps Bay" or " Clifton Self Catering" as Clifton it is a relatively close suburb to the target suburb. This is how keywords with strong relevance are tested and over time their effectiveness will be revealed.

As new keywords are identified as being effective, it is important to continue trying new keywords and adverts in the ongoing hunt for the lowest Cost per Conversion.

SEO Resources

SEOmoz is one of the most beautiful websites on the Internet. They also have a wealth of free SEO information on the site. The two latest free articles are "The beginners guide to SEO" and "Search Ranking Factors".

An extract:

Top 10 Positive Factors for Ranking
1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site'...
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Lin...
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topic...
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linkin...
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

What to do if your Google traffic goes away

There's a great post on webmasterworld.com, one of my favorite SEO websites chatting about what to do if your Google traffic goes away. The poster's traffic dropped to 1/7th of what it was a few days ago and there are a few useful responses. Here are a couple of extracts:

"Last year it took Google from June 27 until December to re-discover our 6 year old rich content and authority site."

"Last year when the same thing happen to us. We recovered about two months later. I hope we recover faster this year. I wish I new what caused this."

"Constantly inserting and deleting url's or content from an index page can lead to a loss of rankings unless you're one of Google's ordained."

"The oft-repeated SEO "rule" of regularly updating your home page is not a truth that applies equally to all kinds of sites, IMO."

If you've lost ranking in Google or you've lost pages, you want to mine this discussion thread. It has a wealth of information that's very current.

SEO - The long-tail approach.

Thanks to Tanya for the invite to contribute.

I'm the former CEO of workzoo.com, a vertical search engine, and am the current founder and CEO of Seattle based LineBuzz.com. Running a vertical search engine, I gained some insight into how search engine designers think and the kinds of engineering problems they deal with.

Ironically, one of the things we did successfully as a business with workzoo was our own SEO. We received thousands of new visitors from Google every day. So I'm going to talk a little about what I think small businesses can do to get more traffic from search engines.

First, the glossary:
SEO: Search engine optimization. The act of promoting your website to search engines without spending any money.
SEM: Search engine marketing. Advertising on search engines using something like Google's AdWords. This costs money.
SERPS: Search Engine Results Pages. The higher you rank the better.
SE: A Search Engine

Rule #1: Think like a search engine software engineer

You don't have to have a PhD to figure out that Google is in the business of indexing new, unique and useful content in the hope of incorporating that content into a search results page that matches a users query as closely as possible.

If you have a unique and useful page of content on your website that isn't showing up in Google's SERPS, then Google isn't doing their job properly. That is why Google themselves tell you to promote your website by getting other related sites to link to your site. Because that's the easiest way for them to find and index your site without any additional work on their part.

As another example, if you have a website that has stolen content from another site and republished it, and your sites pages show up in the SERPS alongside the real owners pages, then Google is also not doing their job properly. That's the reason why there is something called a duplicate content penalty. If Google detects content on your page that has appeared on another page somewhere else on the web, you may get slapped with this penalty and be removed from the SERPS.

The rest of this post is drawn from my personal experience, posts I've seen on SEO websites and common sense.

Rule #2: Exploit the long-tail.
Don't optimize for individual keywords. You'll never get to page one for "real estate seattle" so don't bother trying.

Instead, exploit the long-tail.
Publish lots of content that is interesting to your target market. Then instead of getting a few hundred people a month who are googling a single term (like "real estate seattle") and happen to look at page 7 of the SERPS, you'll get tens of thousands of people who are Googling a wide range of long-tail terms, like "house with wooden shutters on a lake in seattle" and "brick home on a quiet street near a coffee shop in west seattle".

Rule #3: Unique Content is key.

Unique content is the most valuable SEO commodity on the Internet today - and it's how you exploit the long-tail. If you have a large database of textual data that can be formatted into web pages, you are already 80% of the way there. For example, 1 record in your database becomes 1 page. With 10,000 records in a product catalog you have 10,000 unique pages for a search engine to index. Not only that, but each record is different. So if you're an engineering company, one page might be about a "1 millimeter titanium copper plated washer" and another might be about a "two inch diameter hardened plastic pipe" all of which are very specific long-tail search terms that will bring someone looking for that specific thing to your website.

Rule #4: New Unique Content is 10 times better than old Unique content.

All things being equal, a search engine will rank newer content higher than older content because in all likelihood the newer content supersedes the older content. If you're a news site or a blog, you're in business, provided you have constant new and unique content. Don't forget UNIQUE.

Rule #5: Get backlinks, but Choose your Neighbours.

Links from other websites to your own site are important. But links from "bad neighborhoods" may actually decrease your ranking in the SERPS.

You want a handful of links from high-quality websites to your site. I've seen sites with just one high quality link from a highly ranked website shoot up in ranking in the SERPS. And I've seen others with thousands of low quality links stagnate for months.


Rule #6: Get the basics right

Now that you're thinking like a search engine designer, exploiting the long tail by publishing large amounts of unique and useful content, making sure you've got a constant stream of new content on your site and you have a few high quality backlinks, you need to make sure you don't screw up the basics. There are a ton of sites out there that will teach you basic SEO, but here are some tips:

• Make sure your pages validate reasonably well with the w3c page validator. They don't have to be perfect. Just make sure they're not riddled with errors.
• Make sure the title tag in the page header is something that describes the page itself and not your website.
  
• Good: "1 millimeter Titanium copper coated washer"
• Bad: "Mark's enginnering website"
• Use a descriptive URL the way blog platforms do.
  
• Good: http://example.com/1_millimeter_titanium_copper_coa.html
• Bad: http://example.com/page432.html
• Build a hierarchical link structure that looks like a tree. Your home page links to 10 parent categories, which link to 10 sub categories and so on.
• Have plenty of cross-linking in your tree structure. So pages in the hierarchy link to other pages that aren't necessarily above or below them in the hierarchy.
  
• Make sure each page has less than 100 links to other pages on your or anyone elses website.
• Keep page size under 100k.
• Make sure your pages load fast. That means under 1 second for pure HTML without images or other media.
  

My opinion:

I think everything I've written about so far is probably fact. Here are some items that are opinions of mine that you may find hotly debated in SEO forums:

• I don't use an XML sitemap. I prefer to see which pages aren't being indexed by Google because they don't have enough 'link-juice' and then fix my link structure - rather than manually guiding Google in.
  
• I don't use meta-tags. I believe SE's stopped looking at them a long time ago because they figured out webmasters are all liars.
• My approach of going after the long-tail vs optimizing for specific keywords is probably a little controversial, but the data I and others have seen speaks for itself.
  

A final tip: Use Google's webmaster tools to check for errors when Google crawls your website. Keep a close lookout for missing pages, page errors and slow page load times.

Mark Maunder
CEO - LineBuzz.com

Small to Medium Sized Business Resource

Thanks for the invitation to contribute Tanya. It agree that it is a great idea to develop this blog into a resource area for all things web & website related for small to medium sized business owners.

Obvious topics could include Search Engine Optimisation (which you have already been successfully building as a topic) or Pay Per Click advertising as a marketing tool. Perhaps we could touch on some technical issues such as Hosting or new blog developments such as our friends at linebuzz.com

I do hope to make my first contribution shortly.

Organic Traffic | Prospects or Window Shoppers.

No Internet business can succeed without generating website traffic. Internet marketing is all about building website traffic. People have to visit your website for you to have any chance of success in the online marketplace, no matter what business you are in.

It is important to realize however, that not all website traffic is created equal. While there is no such thing as bad traffic, the ideal website visitors are those who are likely candidates for purchasing what you have to offer. The best type of traffic, when you are looking at traffic from the perspective of converting website hits to subscribers or even customers, is organic traffic.

Organic traffic is the term used to describe people who find their way to your website because they were searching for a product or service just like the one you have to offer. Typically organic traffic is directed to your site as a consequence of finding your site on a search engine’s results page.

If your web site is properly optimized for search engines, your website will show up on the results page of the most popular search engines as the result of a very targeted search. When a person finds their way to your website in this manner, he or she is basically a pre-qualified lead for your business.

If I do an internet search for “management books” and I end up on a bookseller’s website, I’m more than likely going to buy one of the books I find there. Someone who ends up on the bookseller’s website as a result of browsing the Internet for Mother’s Day gift ideas might buy a book, but they might navigate away from the site is search of a different kind of gift.

Comparing organic website traffic to other types of traffic is like comparing serious shoppers with money to spend to window shoppers who are just browsing to kill some time in between appointments. As a website owner, which would you rather have, qualified prospects or window shoppers?

Business Owners CAN Learn SEO

Search Engine Optimisation CAN be learnt !

SEO is generally seen as a very technical subject and something a small business owner cannot do for themselves. Yes it is complex subject, but it does not necessarily require a hugely technically minded person to be reasonably successful at boosting your company's Search Engine Results.

The difficultly with SEO work is that it typically requires a huge amount of time before the results are clearly visible. I recently read an article about a small firm in the U.S. who's CEO used to spend in the region of 20% of his time on SEO work. His company already had a very high ranking in the Google search results, and would generated a significant amount of business for the firm. The 20% of time he spent was in fact to maintain his companies position!

So while the science might not be the barrier to entry for a small businesses, the clear obstacle is the time required. Outsourcing can free up your time to focus on running your business, while also allowing you to avoiding the tedious learning curve.

Yes, SEO is a science that can be learnt, but using a professional is usually the most economical route and probably the shortest distance to solid results.

Selecting A Website Design Firm | Cape Town

Cape Town is a creative city and has an ever growing number of freelancer web designers & companies. So how do you navigate all options to find a website development company that is best suited to, and really capable of meeting your particular projects needs?

The answer is not short and some might suggest that I might be a little biased towards our company. My responses is that we have on many occasions walked away from a various projects where we felt it was not our speciality, and we therefore understand that there are various companies for various needs.

I have the view that as the Internet has matured, one or more important differentiation points in the industry was the separation of designers and developers. The design aspect as it suggests is the equivalent of desktop publisher for the Internet, core skill sets include being able to deal with all creative aspects of a website (the Look and Feel). Yes, designers can code but they are usually more creative individuals who are not capable of building hugely advanced websites. Developers on the other hand are less creative and capable of dealing with more complex programming languages and website requirements. They are more mathematically inclined than the typical designer.

Now that I have made this important differentiation, the first selection criteria would be to try and determine which of the above two skills your project requires.

1. Do you need a brochure website with fairly basic functionality? Then yes, you need a designer.
2. Do you have an extensive number of products which you market through your website, perhaps with regular price changes? Then you will probably need a programmer.

My next point is references. Can your potential website company offer strong references, and I don't mean a few happy customers or positive remarks from closely affiliated sites. I mean a number of strong well known clients that are really happy with their end result.

Ask the company for a client list or try and find their clients online. Feel free to contact their clients directly for a completely unbiased view. It's the few unhappy clients that you really want to speak to, to determine possible pitfalls when dealing with a particular company. Also remember that finding one or two clients that are not 100% ecstatic does not necessarily mean that the company might not be the right supplier for you. Rather try and figure out why there might have been a problem before making a ruling. And when you have finally made up you mind, get more references.

Your new website should be a pleasant experience and mostly this is the case. Please do not be deterred by my above comments, but rather be attentive in the supplier selection process. Should you require any advice on a particular project feel free to contact me.

Guest House Package Details

I finally had a chance to list the details of my Guest House* package. Please visit the website packages page for more specific details on what is included and the pricing. I am always concerned when preparing packages that I do not make the point clear that we always work to a clients particular needs, and in no way should these packages been seen as limiting.

*I have intentionally been inconsistent in the spelling of the word Guest House through out this blog , mostly because the number of spelling variations. Guest-House Guesthouse Guest House