Should You Worry About Your Bounce Rate?

Should You Worry About Your Bounce Rate?
A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website – 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal. But does it really matter that much? The answer is “yes” and “no” depending on your goals and your site.

What does bounce rate mean?
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page” – from Google’s Analytics help pages.

When does bounce rate matter?

– If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site

– If exploration of your site is important to you

– If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers

– If yours is a retail site and want people to shop around and make purchases

– If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content

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In Life and SEO – There Are No Guarantees!

Business owners are often asking how they can be ranked #1 on Google, or if they should trust the company that told them they would guarantee a first place ranking. A common turn of phrase is that a company told them they would “put them #1” on Google. If only it were that easy! I always steer clients away from such offers, tempting as they are, and try and explain the complexities and many factors involved in ranking. Google didn’t get to spawn its own verb by enabling folks to ‘put’ any ole’ site at the top!

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Notes and Resources from OC Wordcamp Marketing Presentation

This past weekend I gave a presentation at OC Wordcamp, discussing using a WordPress site for marketing your business, service or product.  As promised, here are the some of the key points, along with links and tools that were mentioned. If anything is missing, leave a comment!

When developing a strategy for your site, the first and most important question to ask is:

Who do you want to come to your site? Who is your target audience?

Thou shall not answer “everybody”!

Get specific since the answer will provide the basis for all aspects of your online marketing strategy.

For more on this topic, also read:
Recharge and Refine Your Marketing Strategy
What Is An Online Marketing Strategy?

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Speaking at OC Wordcamp – WordPress for Marketing

I’ve been given the opportunity to speak this weekend at OC Wordcamp (thanks Brandon!) on the topic: WordPress for Marketing. I will be discussing ways to optimize your blog to market yourself, your business or service. I’ll  be covering things like:

  • Some plugins you can use to help make your site ‘sticky’
  • How to discover what people really want from your site
  • How to collect information from your visitors and develop your mailing list
  • Making sure your site effectively communicates your desired message
  • Find out what’s working and what could be more effective on your site
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Get Focused With Your Website Marketing – A Reader Example

Sometimes I give some freebie advice to my subscribers and readers by way of a blog post. I received an email from Becky at Classy Sassy Couture who is looking for more ways to market her website and improve her SEO. Classy Sassy Couture sells  custom-beaded clothes and accessories via ClassySassyCouture.com. She also blogs at http://classysassycouture.typepad.com

Here’s a few of the questions/comments she had:

She tells me that she’s not sure what to blog about but that she picks up new followers whenever she blogs.

So first things first – that blog should really be on your own domain, e.g. classysassycouture.com/blog .  It hurts me a little inside when I see people linking out to their blogs. While a popular blog hosted elsewhere can still help develop your brand name, it doesn’t help your site’s search engine rankings very much and it’s not very seamless for the user. One of the benefits of having a blog is that it can attract targeted traffic, and can boost your search engine rankings. But if all that lovely traffic is not going to your own domain, you’re missing out. So I would recommend getting WordPress set up on your site and creating your blog on that. You can export your content from Typepad and import it into a WordPress installation.

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Recharge and Refine Your Marketing Strategy

I frequently come across frustrated business owners who are still of the  “build it and they will come” mentality. They don’t understand why they are not getting more web traffic, or why their marketing efforts are not having the desired results.

Any marketing strategy requires constant refinement to make sure it continues to serve your purpose. That also goes for the components of the strategy – making sure that your website, social media campaigns, ads, promotions etc are all optimized to serve your purpose is an ongoing consideration.

Here are some useful questions to apply to any marketing effort that can prod you into more effective action. If you feel that something isn’t working the way you had hoped, try going through these and seeing what you can do better. Make a conscious effort to step back and view your marketing from the objective eyes of an outsider – someone who knows little to nothing about your business.

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