5 Simple Ways to Increase Time on Site

Let’s continue the bounce rate discussion by looking at another relevant metric, Time on Site, and how we can increase the average time your visitors spend on your site. You might wonder why you would need visitors to stay on your site longer than they do. The answer is simply that the longer a visitor’s stays at your site, the greater the chance that they’ll notice something they like and convert into a customer or a returning visitor. There are of course many other reasons for why you want them to stay longer, but the mere fact that you increase time of exposure to your visitors is enough to justify an increase in time spent on site.

So let’s take a look at 5 pretty simple things you can do to increase time on site and get down the bounce rate some more.

1.    Add relevant media to your website.

Try to make your content more alive. Think about how you can use audio clips, video clips or other types of media such as small browser games etc . to increase the time each visitor spends on your site. Videos and games for example are a great way to increase time on site. If you can embed a video nicely in content you’re interested in showing your visitors, you stand a better chance of getting the content noticed. The same goes for small browser games; you can also present interesting page links while the game is loading, or at the game over-screen.

2.    Ask friends, colleagues and partners to find specific sections of your website from the most popular entry pages.

It might seem strange to you that your visitors hit the back button or close your page down quickly after their entry. However, it is important to remember that you’re view of your website is extremely biased. If you have a rather large website with a lot of content or products, you might even have a hard time finding what you’re looking for yourself. You need to look at your website from a user perspective, only then can you make the right adjustments that will cut down your bounce rate and increase time on site.  To do this you can ask other people to find specific sections or information on your website from the most popular entry pages for example. See how long it takes them to find what they’re looking for; if you notice it takes more than what should be reasonable then ask them what adjustments they think could have helped them. Remember that convenience and time effectiveness are some of the biggest reasons people use internet. If a visitor doesn’t find what they’re looking for within reasonable time, then they will leave and you’re very likely to see a drop in average time on site and a high bounce rate.

3.    Insert a breadcrumbs menu on top of your page so that visitors can see exactly where they are on your site.

Let’s say your visitor is looking for a specific type of Nokia phone. If the visitors is looking for Nokia e71 but ends up entering your page through the page of Nokia N85 (or some other model) they might hit the back button; they might think that you don’t have the model they’re looking for. However, if you put in a breadcrumbs menu that looks something like this: Home > Mobile Phones  > Nokia Phones> Nokia e71, you make it a bit more obvious to the visitor that there are more items one level above the page they’re on at the moment.

4.    Show related articles, products or what other similar visitors have liked.

At the end of your page you can link visitors to related articles or products. You can also collect information on what other pages your visitors go to from that specific page and link to those. This is a great way to increase time on site because you will suggest pages to them that are very likely to be relevant to them. Instead of letting your visitors search for what they’re looking for, you actively push what might be relevant to them. This way they might find what they were actually looking for when first entering your page. You can also do this with products if you run a web-shop. For example you can suggest accessories to different products from the product pages. This way you might remind someone to buy an extra battery for the camera they’re about to order, or an extension cord for their new television. Either way you have provided useful information to them that will benefit both you and your visitor.

5.    Use a static box or a section to push most popular pages of your site.

Static boxes or dedicated sections with top lists are almost always interesting to a user. If you for example can list the five most popular sections of your website in a static box that is visible site wide you stand a pretty good chance of making your visitors curious. And a curious visitor is a good visitor because they do not mind spending time on your site if they feel that it is interesting to them. Top lists are a great way to make visitors interested in your content. If you run a web-shop you can list the most popular products, if you have a blog then list the most popular posts, or if you have a community then you can list recent logins or most popular user profiles. As you can see there are tons of things you can do and this will again benefit both you and your visitors, because you provide them with what might be interesting to them instead of letting them waste time looking for it.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

“So you’ll manipulate my website so that I’ll get higher rankings?”

The heading of this post is one of the most frequent statement/questions I come across when discussing search engine optimization with people that do not have any experience of SEO. Many people still view SEO as something shady and unclear. There are probably many reasons for this; mainly that SEO companies and consultants do not properly inform their clients and their prospects about what they will actually try to accomplish in detail. Of course, anyone can say “we will increase your traffic and generate more business”. And they might also keep that promise. But if the website owners never understand what’s been done, they might start thinking of SEO as something almost magical. This will in the long run create a mystified aura around SEO.

I’m sorry to disappoint all the people who would like to view search engine optimization as a magical art that comes with a black hat and a wand. In fact, there’s nothing magical about SEO at all. It’s all about strategic thinking in accordance with what you’re market requires and what you’re offering. Hence, a good search engine optimization is not about manipulating a website or read out a couple of spells – it’s about creating a website that is based on what is actually going on in the search engines.

Let’s first of all make one thing clear. I’m in no way trying to claim that there’s no manipulation going on at all in the industry. There’s probably tons of different websites that are manipulated in one way or another, but these are most likely not websites of serious businesses. A manipulated website usually has short term interests; SEO however is about the long term commitment.  Let me give some examples to illustrate this to you.

Manipulation: If you would want to manipulate a website there are many things you could do. For example you could optimize it for keywords that are irrelevant to what your website is actually about, and this way generate lots of traffic. This might fulfill a purpose for a short term website, but since the website would be irrelevant to most of its keywords the visitors would exit quickly. This is something that the search engines notice; some search engines also see this as a sign of irrelevance and bumps down the website.

For most businesses and websites however, it’s not the amount of traffic that is important, but how relevant that traffic is. It’s always better to rank on 1 very relevant keyword than to rank on 10 irrelevant. The reason is simple: if you’re offering something that fits what 1 person is looking for, and that person finds you, you’re more likely to see a conversion.

I would personally not even want to call this method SEO as I think it confuses things. I’d much rather call it SEM (Search Engine Manipulation) but then of course it would still confuse things; for those that don’t know, SEM actually stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Optimization: If you have a serious website that you want to have a solid and long term marketing plan for, then there should be no manipulation what so ever. This is where SEO comes in; Your website needs to be relevant. You do not want to get huge volumes of irrelevant traffic that will hit the back button in less than a second. You want to focus on searches that fits perfectly with what you do and offer, therefore you optimize.

An optimization always strives to make your website relevant to the visitors that are actively looking for your services or products. There is no manipulation involved what so ever. Let’s say you sell supplements and general health care products. To optimize your website we would need to find which of your products people are actually searching for, and match those searches with the content on your website for example. Again, there would be no manipulation involved, just adjustments to fit your audience.

Let’s face it; if you rank on a bunch of irrelevant keywords that are irrelevant to your business, then you won’t see any great results, if any at all. And if this is the case, then you have wasted time and money (in one way or another) for nothing. This is why you as a client need to make sure you’re not buying general traffic when you’re hiring an SEO consultant or company. You shouldn’t be interested in increasing you’re traffic; in fact you can decrease in traffic but still increase in sales. The reason is simple; by doing an SEO you might cut away a bunch of irrelevant traffic and only focus on a small volume of keywords that convert very well. This might lead to a traffic drop, but a sale increase. And no, there’s no magic behind it, just some good keywords.

SEO is not about making shady changes to a website, manipulating keywords and content or casting spells. It’s a sound way of matching what you actually have with who is actually looking for you. Nothing more or less than that.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

Cut the Crap – Check your Bounce Rate!

If you haven’t installed Google Analytics on your website yet, then I would recommend you to do so right away. Google Analytics will give you great insight to what type of traffic your getting, from where, the behaviour of your visitors and much more.

So what is bounce rate? I would say bounce rate is rather straight forward; think of it as how fast a visitors bounces off your website after their entry rather than continue exploring different sections of it. Some examples of a bounce can be when a visitor hits the “back”-button to leave your site, clicks on a link to a different website or close down the browser window. If you have a high bounce rate it could mean several things. For example, you might be ranking on the “wrong” keywords, meaning you are getting traffic from keywords that are not relevant to what your site is offering. It can also mean that – if you’re running active campaigns – you’re advertising on the wrong places and that you’re getting a lot of low quality traffic. Essentially, that is what bounce rate boils down to – the quality of your site and your visitors. If there is a good match between who is visiting you and what your site is about, you would most often find a rather low bounce rate that is around 25-40%. However, if you’re getting very poor quality traffic you could see bounce rates that are up to 70-80%.

Although low quality traffic can result in a high bounce rate, a high bounce rate does not necessarily indicate low quality traffic. It is important to understand that the bounce rate also depends on what type of website you have. For example it is normal to see high bounce rate levels on websites that focus much of the content and activity on their first page. This can be blogs, rss-feeds, livescore services etc. that do not require visitors to click around on the site. A high bounce rate is therefore not necessarily an indication that something is very wrong on your site.

Why is it then important to know your bounce rate? As you might have figured out, bounce rate helps you to ask the right questions about your website, and can give hints about improvements that can be made. If you have a low rate then you’re most likely doing a lot of things right such as advertising in the right places, matching your content with your target etc. If your bounce rate is rather high, then it will give you indications of what changes need to be made. For example, if your bounce rate increases during a campaign your running, then you might suspect that this campaign is sending you very low quality visitors (unless you’re sending them to a plain campaign section/site). This goes for online media campaigns such as banner adverts as well as SEM and SEO campaigns. If you’re engaging in some sort of activity, and see an increase in bounce rate, then you need to analyze and evaluate your campaign thoroughly.

Once you know where the crappy traffic is coming from, it might be a good idea to just cut it off. Why you might ask, isn’t all traffic good to some extent? Well, not really. First of all there have been some indications that bounce rate might affect your search engine rankings (although this is still being debated). However, search rankings aside, what is more important is that you will save money that you’re wasting on poor quality users. If your campaigns are generating high bounce rates, then you’re not optimizing your ROI. You’d most likely be much better off reallocating those marketing budgets to other sources.

So again, if you already haven’t done it, install Google Analytics and keep an eye on your bounce rate. It might save you a big chunk of your marketing budget.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency

Top 5 Misconceptions about SEO

Out of all online marketing strategies that are out there at the moment, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be the one with most misconceptions and question marks around it. I think there are many reasons behind all the confusion. First of all there are many dubious SEO companies out there that spread out misleading information, and give away promises that are more than unrealistic. However, I think the main reason is that the industry in large has failed in communicating the idea of SEO to the potential clients. I wouldn’t say that a few rotten SEO apples have misled and confused all prospects (although this has happened too often). I think one major problem is that when SEO companies hire staff for their sales squad, they hire salespeople with the philosophy that anyone can learn and communicate the ideas behind search engine optimization.

I remember when I worked for a large SEO company and they were hiring sales staff. All that mattered was previous sales experience and numbers. In fact they did not control for whether the prospect employees had any experience at all in online marketing and/or SEO. The idea was simply to hire the best possible salespeople and educate them into becoming SEO experts. I was hardly surprised when more than 80% of all new salespeople were fired within 3-6 months of starting, and most of the companies SEO clients were utterly unhappy with the service and solution. I simply don’t believe you can take anyone and turn them into a search engine optimization specialist over night. You need to have a good understanding for the dynamics of the search engines, but also for online marketing as a whole. It doesn’t take a salesperson to sell SEO, it sells itself once explained correctly.

So the lengthy intro aside, what are then the most misconceptions of SEO? I would say that the following misled quotes are the ones I run into most often:

1. “Let us fix your meta tags and you’ll outrank all your competition!”

You might read this and think “come on, no one really gives a lousy SEO pitch like that anymore”. Well you’d be surprised. Again, let me take one of my old workplaces as an example. Let me remind you that this is one of the largest SEO and online marketing companies in the world. My colleague was on phone with one of his prospects and he was going on and on about the meta tags and what difference it would make. I was sitting there not knowing if I should cut off his phone line accidently to save him or take a mind note for a future blog post. Yes, I went with the the mind note, and my ex-colleague isn’t even in the online marketing industry today. Let it be said, once and for all: On most search engines meta tags will generate next to nothing when it comes to improving your rankings.

2. “We’ll optimize your website and then you’re good to go!”

Have you ever gone to a barber that have told you he can cut your hair one time only and then you’re good to go for all future? Most likely both you and your barber would realize that the hair is under constant change and that maintenance will be needed regularly to maintain a good look. The same goes for SEO. As your competition, industry and the search engines changes, your optimization will need to adapt as well.

3. “We need to cut away all the fancy flash from your site to optimize it.”

Let me explain one key thing in all onsite optimization. If your website consists of 5 different pages, you will most likely not have to optimize each single page. For example, pages such as “clients” or “about us” will hardly convert into new clients for you, so you would not suffer from designing those sections with some flash elements. Remember that the website is made for people in the first hand, not for search robots. Put the onsite optimization focus on the sections you want to convert, for example your “services” section. An optimized website is not an ugly website!

4. “SEO is a lengthy process and you’ll need to allow 12 months or so for results.“

This might be true in some cases, for example when you’re competing in a very saturated market and have top notch competition. However, for many companies that doesn’t have to be true at all. It all depends on what keywords you choose to focus on, and how well you suit your website after your clients needs. A website that is popular in it’s segment due to good usability and/or products will outrank its competition even if the competition have a better optimization. The reasons for this are many, but one of the main reasons is that a popular website gain links more easily, and as most people know today back-links are vital for search engine rankings.

5. “There are no guarantees in SEO!”

This is a pretty strange saying that still dominates large parts of the SEO industry. If you’re serious about your services and trust in your SEO strategies then guarantees should not be a problem to give. But there is a difference between realistic and unrealistic guarantees. I can only see two reasons for why a SEO company do not want to give guarantees: 1.) They know their client is in a way too competitive market for them to handle but still want to get the deal in, and/or 2.) They know their SEO service is very poor and won’t make a difference to the client’s rankings. I would like to make a seemingly bold claim: all SEO – if done correctly and ethically – will make a difference in the rankings of a website. There should therefore not be a problem to offer some sort of guarantee on the work done. I think a fair guarantee is to offer refund of the cost for the onsite optimization. If you’re onsite changes has made no difference to the clients rankings, then what are you charging them for?

I personally think that SEO is one of the best ways for many companies in the online market to reach their audience and grow their business. I’m pretty sure that most companies will realize the huge potential of the search engines once the question marks around SEO has been straightened out. Remember that true SEO is not about manipulating, it’s about adapting and creating real quality.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency