Wow this title is a bit of a handful and to be honest this post is on various different topics, however it has two main purposes and that is to give you some suggestions on reducing your bounce rates and creating brand awareness by using adwords.
We all want traffic to our blogs/sites and in the early days this can be hard to achieve in a short amount of time without paying for it, yes we can use social media traffic but if we don’t already have a popular profile we need other ways to build our name, or our brand if you have a business.
I have been experimenting over the last few months with Google Adwords, when I say experimenting I don’t mean I have never used it before I simply mean experimenting with SEO Wizz. In my early internet marketing days I used Google Adwords to make affiliate sales, however this method stopped being truly effective some years ago I gave up and and lost my “Google Professional badge”. (Just thought I’d give you a little background into my adwords experience).
I still like to keep on top of Google Adwords developments and experiment with it quite a lot. When using it with SEO Wizz, I did so with an aim of increasing awareness of my brand and not for conversions. It can sometimes feel like a waste of money when your not attempting to convert but let me finish this post before you make your mind up.
I started by targeting search traffic and switched off the content network, I found myself paying around $0.35 at the cheap end and my bounce rate was over 80%. Now I don’t want to get into a debate about bounce rate but I believe a good bounce rate is anything from 50% and below, there are some reasons why it will be higher (using stumbleupon) but I think the 50% mark is pretty good. I say it’s pretty good because at least 50% of your visitors are interacting with your material and increasing their own awareness of your presence.
(Just to clarify for anyone who may be new to this “bounce rate” is the number of visitors that enter your site and go no further than the page they landed on, most leaving after a few seconds, however some have simply found what they were looking for on that page)
Anyway I have been brainstorming ever since to try and get my bounce rate down both from adwords traffic and traffic in general. Look at my new results for the last week;
- Conversion Rate
- General Authority
Clearly if people are interacting with your content more thoroughly, you have more chance of selling your service, product or sheer talent to them.
The authority aspect is not SEO doctrine but it is a personal opinion I possess. I strongly believe if your site is indexed in Google, Google can spy on the metrics of your site. A site with a high Bounce rate can suggest a lack of quality content (we know that does not always figure, sometimes visitors find what they want on 1 page and there is no need to go much further, other times it is longtail keywords we are accidentally ranking for, there can be a whole range of reasons)
However I really do believe Google may use metrics, like bounce rate to assess a sites authority. You only need to look at some of the major sites on the net, facebook, twitter and You Tube?? How high do you think their bounce rates are??
This last bit is my own opinion but even if I am wrong a good bounce rate shows good interaction, good interaction leads to better conversions(readers) and more of these leads to more success.
Hope you all can use this info, but remember no two sites are the same, the above was research on my own blog, you have to keep tweaking and testing in order to find what works for you, the above is to set you off down the right road.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Line BreakAuthor: Tim (275 Articles)
Tim Grice is the owner and editor of SEO wizz and has been involved in the search engine marketing industry for over 7 years. He has worked with multiple businesses across many verticals, creating and implementing search marketing strategies for companies in the UK, US and across Europe. Tim is also the Head of Search at Branded3, an SEO agency in Leeds.
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Great post, it’s good to see your experiments are paying off!
One quick clarification for those that are new to analytics software packages: the metric “bounce rate” means different things depending on the analytics software you are using.
In Google Analytics, which is being used in this example, “bounce rate” means the percentage of people that saw only this page and then exited the site, as is stated above.
However, in other Analytics packages, “bounce rate” can mean something different. For example, in the popular ClickTracks, “bounce rate” means the percentage of visitors which were on the page for less than 5 seconds before leaving.
Thanks for the comment,
Thanks for the clarification on bounce rate, it was a bit of a rambling post and probably didn’t go into as much depth on the analytics side as needed.
Actually, regarding the bouncerate, there is alot of discussion about the time it takes for your visitor to be on your site, NOT to be counted as a bounce, and thus influancing your bouncerate in a negative way.
Some say if the visitor leaves immediately, Google sees it as a bounce, some say they give the visitor even 10 seconds time.
Therefor, another useful measurement is the visitor’s time on the site.
@Borniet,
Totally agree, the more time a visitor spends on your site the more chance you have of converting them into readers, buyers etc….
The idea I was posing was one of putting your most enticing content first, in order to show your visitors why they should stay instead of them having to search for the reasons.
Great article Tim, and thank you for joining my One3rdNerd blog carnival.
I would love to have a chat with you sometime over skype if you use it. Drop me a message to one3rdnerd@inbox.com if you like.
David
Hi David,
Sure I use skype, who doesn’t right
Glad you enjoyed the article.
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