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Combat the Bounce

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The Dreaded Bounce  — What Is It?

Visitors who bounce like this are bad for your rankings.
We’ve all done it. Clicked on a link to a web page somewhere and realized it’s not what we were really looking for. So we click the Back button in our browser and move on. That’s a bounce: we bounced right back to where we came from.

Is a Bounce Bad?

Clearly, a bounce isn’t exactly good; that visitor didn’t buy anything. But is it really bad? Or just … meh?

Actually, it’s pretty bad. It’s not just a “so what?” matter.

When someone bounces, especially when they landed on your site from a search page, that tells the search engine that (at least to that visitor) your page wasn’t a good match for what they were searching for. And if your page isn’t a good match for whatever keyword phrase was searched, the search engine probably won’t want to rank your page as highly next time.

This can hurt you no matter how well your on-page keyword optimization has been done, and no matter how many relevant pages on other sites are linking to your page. Bouncing is a negative ranking factor.

Bounces Are Bad for Google Rankings. How Do You PreventTthem??

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How Do You Prevent Bounces?

This is where you need the skills of a copywriter. You need to make your page uniquely informative  — or fun  — or surprising  — or outrageous  — or provocative. And unique. SEO techniques can’t help you with this. Nothing done with search engines in mind can help you with this. You need to craft each web page with your visitors in mind. What do they need? What are they looking for? What will they like?

And you need to ask them to do something. “Click for more.” “Sign up for our newsletter.” “Tell us what you think.” “What are your questions about this?” “Buy now.” These are calls to action, and their efficacy is undisputed. Why do you suppose when you order a fast food burger they always ask you “Want fries with that?” It’s because they sell lots more fries that way. It can work for you, too.

Find this post useful? Then please click on what Share buttons on the left. Or Tweet it with the button above.  (See how I’m using calls to action here?)

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Do You Write Compelling Headlines?

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Are you writing good headlines?

You need to write attention grabbing headlines!Your web page or blog post or newsletter may be astoundingly helpful or surprisingly informative, great fun to read and generally a gem that your target market really needs to know about and read. But if your subject line or headline isn’t good “click bait”  — something that will make it impossible to pass up without clicking on it  —  no one will know.

You need to grab them with the subject line. In an email newsletter, it’s the subject of the email. In a social media post it’s the headline you give the post or the first few words of the post. On a web page  it’s the page title that will show up in search results. And in a blog post it’s also the page title, but that often duplicates the primary headline of the post.

How to write good headlines for SEO.

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The Value of Good Examples

One thing I’ve often found helpful, especially when a headline or subject line seems beyond my grasp, is to look at some examples.
Info Marketing Blog reprinted 100 great advertising headlines with a brief discussion of each. Review them and you’ll get a sense of what elements go into a real compelling, click bait subject line.

The Financial Brand has s helpful set of rules for creating a killer subject line, even though their focus is financial.

From an advertising perspective, Crazy Egg has a list of nine steps to follow to create a compelling subject line or headline.

And Position Digital has an excellent set of seven steps to a compelling SEO-appropriate headline.

If you don’t get enough inspiration from these sources, try searching in Google, Yahoo or Bing for headline ideas or how to write a headline. There are some great ideas to get you through that writer’s block.

BTW, if you found this helpful, please share it with friends: Like it or tweet it with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts in the comments below.

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How to Fix Your Keyword Stuffed Copy

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Is your web page uncomfortable to read?

Often less experienced SEO practitioners guide you to create copy that employs keyword stuffing. In the early days of SEO around 2001 repeating a verbatim keyword phrase several times on a web page was common. Not anymore!  Now it can hurt.

Keyword stuffing is bad on many levels, and you’ll know it when you read it. That’s why it’s always a good idea to read your web pages aloud to yourself. Do they sound stupid? Are they repetitive? Is your keyword use what I call “over-redundant”?   If so, your copy may read like this:

Two people conversing in a manner that reflects keyword stuffingThat kind of copy hurts.

  • It hurts your image and reputation.
  • It makes for a bad “user experience” on your site (and that’s a ranking factor at Google).
  • It increases your bounce rate (visitors who leave without reading anything else on your site.)
  • It sabotages your conversion rate (the % of visitors who become customers/clients)
  • After the Penguin algorithm updates at Google, it can sabotage your rankings.

You need to fix it. But what if the page ranks well?

This can be a real concern. If the page ranks well, will changing the copy hurt your rankings? Sure, it might. But it might also help if you do it right. Take it slow, make minor changes at first and see how your rankings respond.

How to fix it

The first thing to know is that repeating verbatim keyword phrases is not necessary. Here’s how to fix them:

  • Employ formatting ploys. Search engines don’t register punctuation and line breaks. If you can break up a keyword phrase by having the first word or words at the end of a sentence or paragraph and the rest of the phrase at the beginning of the next sentence or paragraph, your visitor won’t experience the sense of a repeated phrase. But it’s still there and can register with the search engines.
  • Use “stop words” and near-synonyms. These are words that don’t add value to a query and are mostly ignored by search engines. They usually consist of pronouns, prepositions, and articles. For example, these phrases are all essentially equivalent:
    • replace air conditioner
    • replace your air conditioner
    • replace an air conditioner
    • air conditioner replacement
  • Keyword phrases may not even need to be on the page. If you have a page about replacing customers’ air conditioners, it will be quite natural to use the phrase air conditioner throughout the page. It also makes sense for the words “replace”, “replacement”, “repair” and “trade-in” to occur on the page. Even if you never say “replace air conditioner” anywhere, it will be understandable to the search engines that your page is about that. Search engines have gotten much smarter over the years,

Understand that a page that ranks well but drives away potential customers is doing you no good.

Fix it. Make the copy read comfortably. Make it effective marketing copy that drives customers to buy from you. Include calls to action to help encourage the buying decision. If your page is the best it can be about its subject, search engines will want to rank it highly.

If you’re still skittish about it, make incremental changes and watch your rankings. You may well be surprised to see your rankings improve rather than drop.

Need help? Give us a call.

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Penguin Penalty for Keyword Stuffing

/ copywriting, Google, page content / 1 Comment

Penguin Penalizes Keyword Stuffing

Google’s latest significant algorithm change, Penguin, was released in late April of this year.  It’s designed to reward high quality websites and penalize what Google calls webspam. One of the kinds of webspam Penguin is focusing on is on-page keyword stuffing.

In the past SEOs believed that a certain number of iterations of a verbatim keyword phrase was needed in order to score highly enough in relevance and achieve a high ranking in the search engines. Search engines have since gotten much better at understanding matching pages for a query without requiring such verbatim keyword density measures.

But many web pages have nevertheless gotten better rankings than they might otherwise deserve due to overly aggressive on-page keyword placement.

Penguin is designed to put those web pages in their place.

Google penalizes keyword stuffing.

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According to Google:

In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

A parody of keyword stuffing, which is penalized by Google's Penguin algorithm update.Have you inadvertently done some keyword stuffing?

Assuming you haven’t engaged in link spam, it would serve you well to examine your on-page optimization. Now a certain presence of important keywords is essential for a page to rank well, so how do you know if you’ve gone overboard? Respected SEO guru Dan Thies has studied a large number of websites and come up with a test you can do yourself with a printout of your web pages. He calls it The Red Pen test and it should give you a good idea of whether you’ve stepped over the line and are in danger of a Penguin slap-down.

We recommend his keyword stuffing test to you  — you’ll find it here.

 

 

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Keyword Density According to Google

/ copywriting, Google, keywords, page content, SEO practices, user experience / 3 Comments

Google’s Matt Cutts recently addressed a question about what the ideal keyword density is. He refers to the diminishing return of repeated keyword usage and the danger of keyword stuffing which can earn you an over-optimization penalty.

Matt says it best, so take a look at the video.

Increasingly employing variations on a keyword phrase rather than strict repetitions of a verbatim phrase seem to work best.