Bounce Rates – The Snap Judgment About Right Place/Wrong Place

When you think about the single digit number of seconds it takes for visitors to decide if they’ve landed on the right page from a search result, it really makes one ponder “How do visitors decide to stay or leave?”

With Google looking increasingly at user signals like bounce rates, time on site and number of pages per visit, this question is increasingly important.

Bounces are not only lost opportunity in and of them selves in that visit, but also in aggregate contribute user signals about content quality that may decrease the traffic search engines send in the future.

Which makes a lot of sense, right? From Google’s point of view, “you wasted too much of the traffic we’ve already sent you. We’re going to send you less.”

As part of Google’s effort to give back results humans will appreciate, which is really what it’s all about, Google has been rolling out it’s Panda updates.

Here’s a great summary of Panda updates so far and Google’s search for quality.

Considering Panda, quality issues and bounce rates, here are some questions to ponder:

Do visitors have to scroll down your page to get the impression of relevance?

It’s okay to scroll but, in my opinion, that better not be what you’re counting on Mr. Site Owner.  The page better sell relevance without scrolling.

For instance, if you have a button that represents the desired next action like “Add To Cart” or “Learn More,” place it prominently above the fold. I had one client who, for about one decade before we worked together, had the Add To Cart button below the fold, making their product pages appear to be kind of an Amazon showroom without the purchase functionality… all because the button was below the fold.

Does your landing page out of search look like a bad machine-made template?

I guess I don’t mind an attractive/functional template for a catalog page so much, but even catalog pages can include editorial and be made to look like people have been there and liked it. It could include testimonials, star ratings, pull quotes, Facebook likes, Google +1s, an author or editor thumbnail/bio and much more… all kinds of things to make it appear that’s it’s not a place that no man has gone before.

What is fun or useful about this content?

Too many sites take almost a “Hey, I put the products on the shelf – what more do you want?” approach.  What about fun or useful tools or interesting content that people actually appreciate?

Too many pages are like a boring guy at a party who only wants to talk about himself.

The argument against cool content seems to be that it punches a hole in the order funnel. Guess what? All visitors have all the hole they need in order to leave… all the time!

So, ask yourself; “Would I be happy with this content if I was landing from a particular  search result?” If “yes,” great! If “no,” re-think it.

Are you a turd polisher?

Okay, if the site/page is in fact a Cleveland steamer, do you really want to be a polisher of that?  Well, sometimes you have to put a shine on some ugliness. In fact, there may be nothing worse than bad content without the shine. Better still – polish something good. Making something good is harder, but since when do “easy” and “rewarding” rigorously coincide?

Is Google AdSense the first thing visitors see?

If so, just put out a sign; “NOTHING GOOD HERE – GO BACK!”  However, even that might be more intriguing than a big block of AdSense text ads.

This has got to be the biggest clue of all time that you, the visitor, has stepped in something and now have it on your shoe.

Okay, that’s my last poop reference for this post.

If you are integrating AdSense, what about making it part of the page and not something you have to scroll past to see some thin content?

Consider letting the reader get started on your editorial and then integrating AdSense a little further down.

It could be blended into the same background color, without a border. Not many people will scroll past your ads to see your content unless they have some other compelling reason. I’ve seen pages that are almost death by AdSense and I’m sure you have too.

In conclusion, consider applying The Golden Rule… try to make sites you’d be happy to visit.

Start Here: What Is So Damn Special About Your Site?

Are you thinking about gaining search traffic?

I suggest starting here… ask yourself: “What is so damn special about my site?”

If there is something, that is great. If it merely offers your product or service for sale, and that’s about it, don’t expect to be rewarded with a lot of great search rank. Not that it can’t rank. It just won’t be a big plus and for competitive terms you need big pluses.

It would be so much better if there was something that you offer visitors beyond just an offer to buy. I’m thinking something useful, entertaining, timely, relevant or fascinating. For God’s sake… something! Not just the offer to buy your lousy widget or service.

I remember attending a Chamber Of Commerce meeting years ago. It was a typical business mixer. There was this one guy who went around passing out his business card to everyone in the room – people he wasn’t even talking to. He wasn’t even saying “hi.,”  just – bam – “have a card. Have a card! Have a card!!” I remember him as kind of the human embodiment of spam email; “Viagra? Viagra? Want some Viagra?”

Of course, you can argue that the math of spam must work, or who’d be dong it?  Never mind – I digress.

The lesson is, why not engage people over what they’re interested in? The have-a-card guy wasn’t at all interested in his fellow man.  Or, if he was interested, it was only as far as they could help him. Eeww!

Why not offer visitors something, like any good hostess does when guests come a-callin’? The web equivalent of “Sit down, hon. Can I get you something to drink?”

In that way you’re building trust, appreciation, return visits, longer stays, more meaningful friendships, the possibility of meeting their friends and all of them liking you… all good search stuff.

One might ask: “But, does Google look at this? I’m terribly self-centered and I really don’t want to go to the trouble unless Google looks at this.”

You bet she does! She’s like the ministry of hostessing, helping inexperienced hostesses the world over make their guests feel welcome. In the ideal, she does this by rewarding good manners and penalizing bad manners.

But how does Google judge who makes their guests feel welcome? Who is a good hostess?

Let’s start with links. Google has always looked at links to your site as little votes for your site. To be clear, not all votes/links are created equal. For instance, a New York Times link to your site will be worth more than most directory links to your site.

In any case, Google generally sees links as sites referencing something important… thus raising the linked-to site’s importance in Google’s eyes.

Ergo, if the New York Times likes you enough to link to you, you must really be somebody offering something interesting, entertaining, useful or relevant.

In addition, Google looks at lots of other factors to try and determine user-engagement and the quality of the content, including but not limited to:

–          Social signals, Facebook Likes, Tweets & Google’s own Plus 1s

–          Time on site

–          Pages per visit

–          Bounce rates

–          Click-thru rates from Google’s results pages

–          Anchor text in links to your site

–          Authority of sites linking to you

What do you think Google thinks when it offers a page as a search result and 3 seconds later the visitor has back-paged back to Google and is clicking on the next search result?

Google is thinking, “Sheesh, sorry… I guess that was a bad result.”

Google also looks at elements of your site to try and figure out just how special your site is, including but far from limited to:

–          Unique content (stuff not found elsewhere)

–          Video (Google loves video – more about that another time)

–          Relationships between words

–          Quantity of text

–          All kinds of tags or hidden labels

Google also looks at all kinds of errors or potential negatives. Kind of like, if you have a house with an un-repaired broken window, maybe it’s not really being taken care of:

–          Duplicate content (same content all over your site or between your site and other sites).

–          Broken links

–          Misspellings

–          Amount of ads

–          Broken images

–          Missing, duplicate or lengthy tags

–          Too many links

–          Too long or too dynamic of a url

–          Server errors

–          Inaccessible pages

–          Non-compliant code

The above is a super partial list and really doesn’t do any of it justice. Don’t worry about that right now. Just ask your self this though: “What is Google getting at with all this?”

Here’s the answer: Google is asking itself, through the miracle of math, “What is so damn special about this site?”

Okay, one can make a bad site look a lot better to Google.  No doubt about it. I’ve done it a hundred times because not everything is great.

There’s a whole industry, larger than steel manufacturing in this country, in turd-polishing… taking a bad site and making it seem to Google as better than it is. And, often that can work for a while. But, how much better would it be to make something actually good and then polish that to a dull shine?

Finally, as time goes by, the elements that one can more easily manipulate are increasingly less important to Google. For instance, at this writing Google is still in love with a domain name that exactly matches the keyword search. So, if your search term is “Belgian turd polishers,” Google is fairly inclined to rank BelgianTurdPolishers.com really high. Maybe even number one!

Going forward, it is a sure-thing that Google will decrease the value of a top level domain exact match and BelgianTurdPolishers.com will circle the drain and be gone!

The same can probably said of lots of other search advantages that don’t directly address the quality issue… figure that over time they will work less and less – they’re temporary.

So, what is permanent?

Permanent is quality content that real human beings (as opposed to search bots) actually appreciate. Start there. Start with “Here is what’s so damn special about my site” and then polish that!

Coming Up:

–          Answering the “so damn special” question.

The Truth? You Can’t Handle The Truth About Search Marketing

Thinking about the future of search marketing?

Think of Colonel Jessep in the 1992 movie A Few Good Men: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Just in case you can handle the truth and are still reading, here’s my take on the big picture.

Let’s back up a little first.

Google has always said, in essence, the same thing: “Give me relevant, entertaining, informative and/or authoritative content that real people searching on Google will appreciate and we’ll give you search rank.”

That’s the basic deal.

That seems like a fair trade, right? Just give Google what it wants (a good result) and get something back of equal or greater value… search rank. Maybe not immediately, but hopefully over a period of time.

Google has always had only one basic method to apply to figuring out the trade and what to rank… math. So, somewhere in the Google Empire exists a really big math formula that Google applies to decide which web page gets what rank for which search terms.

It’s a really big formula and it’s not getting any smaller. I’ve heard from folks at Google that the algorithm takes into account something like 200 elements. Think of a chalkboard with 200 numbers all in relation to each other. How do you even begin to comprehend that?

The fact is, you don’t. For starters, you’re not told the formula. Google’s algorithm is like the recipe to Coca-Cola. It’s a secret. Google’s formula is its weapon in the Spy vs Spy game of search marketing. Google is not going to give you a tour. That would only help you trick it.

So over the years, the 1/4th of planet Earth’s population involved in search marketing has tried to trick Google into bad trades… getting good search rank in return for bad content.

Who hasn’t experienced the result of this? You do a search and here comes a lot of irrelevant junk.

To rank for search terms a decade or more ago, maybe all you had to do was repeat the term a lot. Here, I’ll do that now and if this was 1999, I’d be ranking this page, maybe on Alta Vista: The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing, The future of search marketing,

Do I have rank yet?

Sadly, no.

Or, back then, I could load up the tags (unseen page code) with a whole bunch of words, like the Oxford English Dictionary and, voila, rank for almost everything!

Over time, Google’s formula has gotten smarter. It’s like the notion that good judgment comes from experience and a lot of good experience comes from bad judgment. At this point, Google has had a lot of experience and has gained increasingly better judgment.

Also, the reason that 1/4th of the Earth’s population is pursuing search rank (okay, not the Yanomami tribesmen, but almost everyone else) is because search rank equals money. So, competition is way up!

So, Google has gotten a lot smarter and now it looks at a wide variety of elements… user behavior (time on site, bounce rate), social signals (Google +1, Twitter, Facebook), the relationships between words, the relative value of links and maybe 196 or more other things.

So what are two billion search marketers to do?

The answer is obvious; “Give Google what it wants.” Give Google content that visitors will appreciate. It’s almost that simple.

Is that really all you have to do?

No, I was making it overly simple for the sake of raw impact,  but good content is a great foundation to build on.

To pull a quote from Winston Churchill (because it’s about time for another quote) about where we are on the search algorithm timeline (because Churchill was way into search marketing):

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It’s the end of the beginning where Google could easily be tricked into giving good rank to bad content. Now don’t freak out… the web will always have plenty of bad content. Hopefully, less of it will show up in your search results.

As a search marketer,  what do you do? Join the Yanomami?

No, they don’t want your lousy content either.

The place to start is to make really good content that’s usable or entertaining to real people.

With Google looking at so many clues about what real people actually appreciate, one would be crazy to follow the Wile E. Coyote method of tricking the Road Runner… painting pictures of tunnels on rock walls, elaborate jet packs, catapults with anvils… these methods will only backfire and plant you in coyote-shaped hole.

Ask yourself, “what would a real person actually appreciate?”

Also, be creative and take chances.

Start there.

Yes, we’ll still apply a lot of SEO and marketing know-how, but we’ll be applying it to good content.

Why?

Because we’re pragmatic and bad content is too hard to make work. Also, bad content, if it works at all, works for a shorter amount of time.

Q. Mike, why did you think I couldn’t handle the truth about search marketing?

A. Because people, sadly, often don’t think in terms of what does the other person want. They think in terms of “here’s what I want.” And then make content accordingly.

Making content that serves others is often a higher hill to climb. Going forward, it may be the only real path to search success.

In closing, don’t be Wile E. Coyote. Be smart. Make something good.

Coming up:

– How To Start

– What Do You Do With Your Content After You’ve Made It?

Where Does Good Content Come From?

Where does good content come from?

That’s like saying “how do you write a good story?” Here are some ideas:

Start with which keyword phrases you are trying to rank on. It’s always good to narrow it down to which SERPs you’re trying to move.  So, if you were trying to rank on the words “inline skating,” you’ve at least narrowed it down to that general subject area. Don’t fixate on those words. Just notice the subject areas.

Brainstorm ideas. Write down every crazy idea you can come up with. Mix and match ideas. Don’t evaluate the ideas. Just list as many as you can. Be creative.

At this stage, don’t worry about how you’re going to accomplish the ideas or who it will appeal to. That comes later. To start off, you should consider everything.

Don’t copy anyone. You should be able to come up with some original ideas for improving your site. If you can’t come up with some new and good ideas, then try again the next day. If repeated attempts fail, consider getting some help.

I’ve met some folks who didn’t have some good content ideas because they just haven’t thought about it. It’s as if good ideas only occur randomly as gifts from the gods. I find that they’re mostly the product of actual thinking.  Thinking looks like sitting still, which looks like doing nothing and is therefor lazy or unproductive. So, people often combine it with something else, like driving and thinking or shaving and thinking. Try just thinking.

Time spent thinking is really some of your most creative time. Of course, if you snag a good idea while slipping on a banana peel, then that works too.

Don’t be so politically correct that you can’t afford to piss anyone off. No matter who you’re making the site for, take a chance on not appealing to everyone all the time. If you are so predictable and conforming, you run the risk of suffering low visitor interest. Remember, you’re just brainstorming. So, don’t edit yourself.

Don’t merely choose from someone else’s list of possible content types such as polls, articles,  and videos. Try to look at the subject with totally fresh eyes about what might be captivating. Remember, you need to make something good enough that someone will voluntarily link to it.

I’d tell you to go look at cool site stuff, but honestly, I think it’s a waste of time.  You’ve seen plenty of other sites.

Better to clear your mind and think more about your subject area. Maybe take a bath and let ideas pass through your mind as you relax. Close your eyes. It will free up more of your brain to be creative.

If no exciting content ideas occur to you, contact me at seoppq@yahoo.com for a free consultation. I can relax in a bathtub and come up with good ideas for you.

We’ll talk about your site and how you see it. If I go on to write a proposal, it will include a menu of content ideas and costs. I can execute those ideas for you or you can take them and have them done elsewhere.

So go fill up the bathtub and get started!

What Is Good Content?

What is good content?

My definition of “good content” is content that appeals to visitors  as evidenced by gaining organic links that help elevate the page/site in the SERPs.  Here are my elements of good content:

1. It has to be relevant to your site. So, if you have a video of a pitching machine hitting someone in the groin with a baseball, that’s priceless. Unless, your site is one of the few sites that have nothing to do with accidents caught on video or baseball.

2. It’s best if it’s 100% original to your site. To clarify on this item, we’re talking mostly about text. If it’s original to your site, it may still attract links.  However, duplicate text content where yours is not the original can cause your pages to be filtered out of results. Ergo, it may achieve links, but may not help you in the SERPs for that page and therefor fails our definition.

3. Good content has to make someone want to link to it without receiving a payment in exchange. Here are some reasons people link to content (with some overlap). Note that these reasons/causes overlap with each other and are completely subjective. Good content is one or more of the following in the eye of the beholder:

– It’s useful

– It’s funny or entertaining.

– It teaches something.

– It’s thought-provoking.

– It’s news.

– It’s smart or well-written.

– It’s important information.

– It reveals a truth.

– It’s beautiful or sexy.

– It’s a great example of something.

– It’s a fact or opinion that someone agrees with.

– It’s a fact or opinion that’s controversial and/or pisses someone off.

– It helps make some point.

– It makes the linker look smart.

– It’s fun to use.

– It causes an emotion: Joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, anticipation, optimism, disappointment, love, remorse, submission, contempt, awe, aggressiveness or disappointment.

– It helps one make or save money.

– It saves time.

– It’s authoritative.

– It enables an online or offline experience.

– It provides a forum for visitors to post.

– It shows someone hit in the groin with a baseball.

If it’s none of the above, are there still reasons someone will link to it? I can’t think of any, but maybe you can.

What Is So Bad About Linkbait?

What is so bad about linkbait?

I think it’s the word itself. There aren’t a lot of really positive phrases that include “bait.”

– Jailbait

– Bait and switch

– To bait someone

– Live bait (not for long)

Something about “bait” makes it sound sneaky or bad, like tricking a person or a fish. Really, linkbait is the exact opposite.

“Sneaky or bad” is writing seo articles and repeating keywords so many times that it reads like un-medicated crazy talk. No one is going to link to that. God help you if Google ever checks your site by hand.

To me, “linkbait” just means making something good enough that someone else will link to it. What could be better than that? In fact, that is precisely what Google is trying to do: find and elevate better and more relevant stuff.

It makes me wonder why is any time at all is spent on keyword-stuffed seo articles? I hate to put millions of folks out of work, but keyword-stuffed articles just don’t do much for you on competitive keywords. Page one rank for competitive keywords goes to pages that also have a robust link profile.

“Okay Mike,” you say “but I can create links that appear organic and together with a crappy $15 seo article show up in the serps.”

You can also remove all of your body hair, but how tedious, painful and pointless is that?

Here are seven reasons not to try to fake Google out with a keyword-stuffed seo article:

1. You may have rank, but you won’t get many clicks.
2. As Google improves, this tactic will work less and less.
3. Why not put that work into something good?
4. You may lose all search rank once you’re caught and penalized.
5. It’s like admitting you’re too stupid to make something good.
6. You’re going to cheese-off whatever visitors you have.
7. More reasons that repeat and re-rephrase elements of the first reasons.

BTW, what is our fascination with numbered lists? That will probably be another post.

Anyhow, from my point of view, linkbait would be preferable to a bad seo article. “Linkbait” just means that it’s good enough to link to.

Your thoughts about linkbait?