In today’s highly accessible digital world, truly anyone can make a website. There are many website design systems available to individuals, small businesses, and even large corporations. These site builder tools range in price; some are free, while others charge a monthly subscription fee or flat cost. When you use these systems to design your website, you almost always pay for what you get. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix, utilize templates that make it easy to build a decent site quickly. However, these templates often lead to a cookie cutter display that can’t fully support your unique brand aesthetics, while lacking optimization that can help a site rank on search engines. If you aren’t able to afford a custom site design, a site builder tool can help you establish an online presence, but when you work with a marketing firm that provides comprehensive web design and search engine optimization (SEO) services, you increase brand awareness, grow your audience, and go above and beyond the quality a cookie cutter template provides. MLT Group offers complete web services, including custom site design, marketing, SEO, social media marketing, graphic design, and video production for web. Based in Rochester Minnesota, we work with a broad variety of customers across the US. From service companies to manufacturers, if you’re looking to develop a website or expand an online brand, MLT Group can provide effective SEO/marketing in Rochester, MN and across the country.
Analytics
With any website, performing analytics regularly to measure the success rate of user interaction is important. If your site is effective, you’ll see positive conversion rates. Conversions occur whenever a user takes a “next step” on your website that creates a contact. This could be signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, downloading a white paper or coupon, or another form of interaction. If your conversion rates are low, you’re likely experiencing a high rate of user bounce. Users will click away from a site without taking “next step” conversion actions for many reasons.
Why Bounce Rates Occur
Let’s look more at users. Everyone fills the role of “user” as they interact with various websites daily. You don’t have to be a website designer to understand if a site offers a good user experience. If you consider the websites that you use, you can likely identify aspects of the sites that make them better or worse to utilize. Bounce rates increase for websites that are unpleasant or difficult to use. Some common causes of user bounce include:
Loading time:
Websites with pages that load slower than three seconds often experience significant bounce rates. In fact, many users report they will click away from a site that takes longer than two seconds to load. Increasing your site’s loading time will almost certainly guarantee a reduced rate of user bounce. Additionally, faster loading sites encourage better ranking results because search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo all value quick content loading pages higher in their ranking systems.
Content fulfillment:
When users enter a query into a search engine, they are often looking for something specific, but exactly what they are asking can be difficult to determine. If a user searches for “sustainable clothing,” for example, you can’t always be sure if they are looking to purchase sustainable clothing, learn more about what sustainable clothing is, or read reviews of sustainable clothing brands. If your site is coming up on a search engine results page (SERP) with a “sustainable clothing” query but your site’s content doesn’t answer the user’s question, you may experience a bounce. By analyzing your site’s keywords, comparing competing sites that rank with those various keyword searches, and expanding your content based on the intent of users you would like to attract, you can reduce those bounces with more targeted content fulfillment.
Site design:
The aesthetics of your brand can be engaging and reduce bounce rates because of the immediate user interest the aesthetics induce, but a more significant reduction in bounce rate will come from the core of your site design. First of all, your site should be clear, easy to use, and intuitive. Brand aesthetics are important, but user experience is key in retaining users and creating conversions. Ever heard the expression “a place for everything and everything in its place”? Your website should emulate that idea so that users understand how to get around the site and can easily find what they are looking for. “Rage” and “dead” clicks come from users becoming frustrated with content that looks like a hyperlink or button but doesn’t take them anywhere or confusing navigation that wastes their time. Sites of any significant size may benefit from an option to search your site. A simple search system will encourage users to engage with your site to find more information or narrow their query results. Sites without a search system often experience bounce rates from users returning to the Google search bar because they didn’t find exactly what they need from that site’s landing page. Another design tool you can use is the inverted pyramid style. An inverted pyramid for text or media content can generate a hook of a user’s attention with a lead, move into details below, and finally answer the user’s initial question.
Calls to action:
When users interact with a website, they are invited to respond to a range of calls to action (CTAs). CTAs include prompts to sign up for a mailing list, subscribe to a newsletter, make an account with the brand, use a coupon code, make a purchase, view similar products, contact the company, and more. There are many kinds of CTAs for different scenarios. Strategic placement of CTAs, without compromising the quality of user experience, can improve conversion rates. Additionally, if you adjust your CTAs to include keywords pertinent to your SEO and site content, you can enhance your ranking on SERPs. For example, if you own a sustainable clothing brand, you can change a CTA from “Learn More” to “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Navigation links that more clearly target what the user will find are good for users and search engines.
Bounce Rank Analysis
There are many other causes of user bounce, and it can be a difficult thing to analyze. In fact, some user bounce is because the site is working the way it should. For example, if people are coming to your website looking for your phone number and they find it immediately when they hit the home page, without having to visit a contact page, they get what they need and bounce off the site quickly. That’s a positive conversion, so a high bounce rate doesn’t always equate to ineffective user engagement. Still, understanding how users are interacting with your site is important to enhancing results. No matter how you engage users and increase conversion rates, it all starts with effective SEO and marketing action. Without quality SEO/Marketing tactics, your site won’t be ranked high enough on search engines to even be on the radar of users important to you. Learn more information about the basics of SEO and how a marketing firm can help.
Why SEO/marketing Works
Google and other search engines each use their own algorithm to crawl, index, and rank website pages. This means they send crawling “bots” to examine all the pages on the web for keywords, metadata, and other information. These bots return the gathered information and the search engine uses it to categorize or index each page. The pages are then provided on a SERP, ranked in an order that the algorithm judges to best answer the user query. A website can change its format and use tools to influence that ranking system to its favor. If you utilize search engine optimization techniques approved by Google, like intelligent placement of keywords, fresh content generation, and fast load times, you can increase the likelihood of a higher SERP ranking.
Digital SEO/Marketing Campaign
An effective digital marketing campaign will use SEO/Marketing and a good quality website as foundational to guiding the entire system. You need an online presence that serves your target audiences and ways to help those users find you. Social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising can also figure into a strategy for being easy to find and easy to do business with.
Ever-Changing Best Practices
The highly specific and ever-changing best practices of SEO and site design can be complex for website owners. If you are unsure of how to adjust your SEO/Marketing and website to reduce bounce rates and increase conversions, we can help. To learn more about our services for SEO/marketing in Rochester, MN and across the US, contact MLT Group at 507-281-3490 or sales@mltgroup.com today.