Keeping Your Visitors in Your Web Site

[Whitney Hill]

Getting people to your web web site is just half the battle. Keeping them there and accomplishing a desired result is another. Having high bounce rates (def. visitors who come into your site and immediately leave) costs you high search engine rankings and loses what should be good visits.

Here are some tips to improve your web site landing for more conversions:

1. Design your web pages with a goal in mind. Is your goal to get leads, educate your marketing, build your brand or communicate information to your customers? Whatever your goal is, design your pages with the end in mind.
2. Design your pages so that visitors recognize they are in the right place. Use photos, titles and branding so that it is obvious to the visitor that they are in the right site.
3. Use social media buttons. Good social media allows visitors to peak in the back door to get real organic information about your company, giving you customers that qualify themselves. The social media buttons will increase the stickiness of your site to reduce bounce rates.
4. Use animated images and videos to create stickiness. Be careful not to go overboard. Keep it simple. Have an image of a frame in the video at the top of the site, so that it stands out.
5. Put information request form in the body of the site where it is easily seen. If your goal is to get prospects, make it easy for the prospect to see the form to request information, get a free offer or engage with a shopping cart. Keep the form very simple with no more that five or six fields.
6. Keep your pages and navigation simple, and easy to find. White space is your friend. Do not overload the content in the web pages. While lot's of text up to a certain point can help with the search engines, most people will not read but so much of it. Use bullets where possible. A complex navigation or one that is difficult to find will frustrate your visitor and cause them to bail out. If you have a large site, consider implementing a search window for the site.
7. Use Google Analytics to check results. Check your results using Google Analytics and fine tune if necessary. Work on or eliminate unpopular pages that have high bounce rates or are not visited.

Remember...You are competing with the web universe for your visitors time. Make it so they want to stay.

[Bob Walton]

Making a page sticky reduces bounce rate (time people leave your site) which google likes and helps some for SEO.