“There’s a Hole in Your Website, Dear Marketer, Dear Marketer…”
By Anna Johnson on January 10th, 2009Actually there may be a few ‘holes’ when it comes to leaking traffic i.e. where visitors come to your website only to quickly leave. In many cases, however, there are two main reasons for traffic leaks. And, fortunately, there are fixes for both.
One of the major holes, recently highlighted by SEO expert Jill Whalen, actually has more to do with the kind of traffic you’re attracting, than the fact you’re losing that traffic.
This particular ‘hole’ is due to attracting a lot of untargeted traffic via irrelevant keyword searches. In other words, your website is ranking highly in the search engines for keywords that are largely irrelevant to what your website is about!
To some extent, this is inevitable. Indeed, the more content you have on your site, the more likely you’ll get some level of untargeted traffic.
As Jill says, however, if you’re getting more irrelevant than relevant traffic, then there’s a problem. To be specific, you are not being focused with your keyword choice.
The solution? Jill recommends firing up your website analytics program and identifying the pages generating the irrelevant traffic. Then reword the copy and title tags to target relevant phrases, while removing any extraneous words.
The second big hole is due to having a high ‘bounce rate’ on your most important web pages. In this case you may well be generating targeted traffic, but for some reason your web visitors are not spending much time on your page or website.
Of course, before we go further, let’s be clear on what we mean by ‘bounce rate.’ There are actually two different definitions of ‘bounce rate’ which largely relate to how different web analytics programs measure it.
On one definition, the bounce rate reflects the proportion of visitors who spend less than a certain amount of time on a web page.
On the other definition, the bounce rate reflects the proportion of visitors who only went to one page of your website i.e. they arrived on the page and then went elsewhere.
This second bounce rate definition is the one used by Google Analytics. And that’s important to know because it’s widely believed that search engines such as Google use the bounce rate as a factor in their algorithm to determine the ranking of a web page. A high bounce rate will detract from the ranking of a given web page.
Based on the second definition of bounce rate, you can probably imagine that in some cases a high bounce rate is desirable – it may indicate that someone has found what they’re looking for or performed the task they were supposed to perform. For example, where a person visits a download page.
But if your most important pages – i.e. the pages you rely on to attract traffic and build interest in what you offer – have high bounce rates… that’s a problem.
The first step in fixing such a problem is to work out why you have such a high bounce rate.
To this end, consider the:
- Design of the page – does it look ugly or amateurish? Is it likely to be a turn-off for visitors?
- Layout and navigation – is it actually difficult for people to navigate off the page to other parts of your website? Is the navigation confusing?
- Browsers and screen resolutions used by your audience. Put it this way, if your website is only viewable by people with the latest browsers or screen resolutions… yet a large proportion of your visitors use old computers and old browser versions, many visitors may simply be unable to view and navigate your site properly.
On that basis, check your web analytics to see the proportion of visitors using various browsers and screen resolutions so you can target your site to the majority of your visitors.
Source: Jill Whalen, “Are You Ignoring The Cries Of Your Website,” High Rankings Advisor, January 7, 2008
