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Frightening News about Page Speed and Bounce Rate

/ Google, SEO practices, user experience / Leave a Comment

Page speed and bounce rate – a couple of definitions

  • Page speed: the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific web page.
  • Bounce rate: the percent of visits to a site that look at only one page.

Measure your page download speed and keep it under three seconds

How page speed and bounce rate are related

Impatience drives visitors to leave a web page that doesn’t display on their computer or phone as quickly as they want it to. That’s a bounce. The rule of thumb currently is that you begin to lose significant numbers of visitors when your page speed exceeds two seconds. Pingdom says:

… the average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!

Graph showing the relationship between page speed and bounce rate
This graph illustrates the bad news. As page download time increases beyond 3 seconds, bounce rate increases dramatically.

A high bounce rate represents lost business.
If your goal is for visitors to take an action on your site, such as filling out an information form, contacting you, or buying something  — then bounces  represent lost customers.

But it’s actually worse than that.

Ranking factors on Google

It’s been well known and reported here that page speed is a ranking factor at Google.  We began warning about it way back in 2009.  All else being equal, a fast downloading page will outrank a slow page.

We’ve also pointed out that a high bounce rate is a negative ranking factor on Google as well.

Frightening fact: Slow web page speed drives up your bounce rate. We explain.

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Update June 2018: If your market is international, it may help to know what your page speed is overseas. I recommend a test at DotCom Tools that will test your page speed at over 20 international cities.

Update December, 2019:  Matthew Woodward in the UK has written a helpful guide you may find useful. 6x Free Ways To Increase Website Speed (and search traffic!)

Why it gets really bad

The frightening thing about all this is that these two negative ranking factors compound one another. It’s bad enough if you suffer a ranking penalty because your page is slow. But that slowness raises your bounce rate, resulting in a double-whammy to your ranking in Google search results.

Our recommendation is to work to make sure your pages all download within three seconds at the most. Two seconds is ideal, but three seconds is usually tolerable.

We always welcome your perspective. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

We offer a free SEO review of your website, including page speed and many other factors. Call us and let’s set it up.

 

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Does Your Site Use Intrusive Interstitials? Better Not!

/ Google, page content, user experience, web design / Leave a Comment

Why you need to avoid intrusive interstitials

What’s an Interstitial?

An interstitial is an ad that appears in between two pages. Sometimes they can appear before the home page on your site. Often interstitials are pop-up ads, but sometimes they will be helpful, like an offer to chat with a live person. An interstitial ad is a form of interruption marketing used by advertisers who want their ads to be more like broadcast ads.

Many interstitials are just fine. But you want to be  sure your interstitials aren’t intrusive.
Examples of intrusive interstitial's that can generate a Google ranking penalty.

What’s wrong with an intrusive interstitial?

An intrusive interstitial or pop-up ad is one that annoyingly blocks all or most of a page. This is more problematic on mobile sites where there’s much less screen real estate. With less room on the screen it’s very easy for an interstitial to be considered intrusive.

One thing intrusive interstitials do is that they annoy your visitors. That’s a bad thing in and of itself, especially if it’s annoying enough to drive the visitor away. They also slow down the loading of your site because it’s extra material to download into a phone or browser.

You need to avoid intrusive interstitials on your website!

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Why is it important to avoid them?

It’s been well known for years that Google favors fast sites. If your interstitial is slowing down the display of your pages, that might hurt your ranking. But even beyond that, Google hates them. Google announced about a year and a half ago that at the beginning of 2017 intrusive interstitials would negatively affect your ranking. And here at  Rank Magic we are always concerned about the health of your rankings.

A few exceptions

Google has identified three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal” if “used responsibly.”

  • Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
  • Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
  • Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app-install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Please join the conversation and share your observations in the Comments section below.

If you’re struggling with your online visibility, please call us. Because at Rank Magic, we can fix that!

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Page Speed for Google Rankings and Conversions

/ Google, user experience / 4 Comments

Page Speed Affects Your Search Rankings and Conversions

Take a stopwatch to your page download speeds.
When it comes to your website slow speed kills rankings and conversions.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed refers to how quickly a page on your website downloads into a visitor’s browser or phone. It can be measured a few ways. Google and some other sources report a score for your speed on a scale of 0-100. Others display it in seconds.

You can measure page speed a few ways:

  • Time to First Byte (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte from the web server
  • Page Load Time (how long it takes to fully display the page)
  • Above the Fold Time (how long it takes to fully display as much as you can see without scrolling down)

However you measure it, faster is always better.

However you measure it, the faster your web pages load for a visitor, the better.

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Page Speed and Google

I’ve written before about how a slow page speed can hurt your rankings in search results. Google has explicitly stated that how quickly a site loads into a browser is now a ranking factor. All other things being equal, a faster site will outrank a slower site.

Google  scores your site separately for download to a desktop/laptop computer and for a phone. It’s quite common for those to get very different download speed scores. And mobile speeds are usually slower than desktop speeds.

Mobile Speed is Increasingly Important

Google is moving toward a mobile-first index, which means that the information they know about your website comes from the mobile version of your site,  not the desktop version.  Those two may be the same for a responsive site, but some websites actually have differing amounts of information between the two, usually with the mobile speed being slower. Since Google is now focusing on the mobile version of your website, it stands to reason that the page speed it measures on a phone is more important than the speed it measures for a desktop/laptop computer.

Google really cares how fast your web pages display on a phone. We explain.

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Page Speed and Your Visitors

A visitor snoozes while waiting for a slow page to load.
Don’t test your visitors’ patience or put them to sleep with slow page speed.

There’s another equally important reason to pay attention to your download speed: visitors. We are all increasingly  stressed over time and as a result have less patience for watching a slow web page load in our computer. If your page is too slow, visitors may leave before the page ever loads for them. If they find you in search, become impatient and immediately go back to the search results to select something else, Google makes note of that as a black mark against your page. That will negatively affect your  rankings moving forward.

Needless to say, the more people who abandon your website, the fewer conversions (converting visitors to paying customers) you will see.

Compared to a page with a two-second page speed, one that takes six seconds can expect to lose 25% of its visitors to abandonment.

page speed related page abandonment percentages
Abandonment rates as a result of slow page speed

Several years ago, Forbes reported

A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.

Assessing Your Page Speed

There are several tools you can use to assess whether your page downloads quickly enough.

Each of these measures and scores differently. You’ll get the best idea of your page speed by running and evaluating all of them.

Fixing Your Page Speed

How to fix a slow page is beyond the scope of this discussion. It’s technical enough that most small business owners aren’t equipped to attempt it. This is something best left to your webmaster.
If you’d like an idea of what’s likely to be involved, the folks at Moz list the main factors at play in this overview.

Update 12/30/2019:  Matthew Woodward in the UK has also written a helpful guide you may find useful. 6x Free Ways To Increase Website Speed (and search traffic!)

This is just one of many factors that affect your online visibility when people search for what you do. We can help with the full array of optimization factors. Contact us for a free SEO consultation.

How has your experience been, wrestling with your site speed issues? We’re interested in your perspective: please comment below.

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How to Get Rid of a Bad Online Review

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 Oh, No! You got a bad review on Google!

Google's G logoWe’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to removing bad online reviews. Let’s start with the bad news. The bad news is that you can’t actually “get rid” of a bad online review.

Don’t stop reading!

The good news is there are ways that you can combat any negative online reviews you get — on Google and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the truth is, Google doesn’t care about your business or your reputation. They just want to give customers what they are looking for so that Google stays the top search engine. All so they can continue to have people pay them to advertise on their network. At the end of the day, they aren’t going to care if you got a bad online review when you didn’t do anything wrong. There is nothing they can do about it, or, we should say … there’s nothing that they will do about it.

But, wait. Should you even care if you have negative reviews? Absolutely! Online reviews are very important in today’s market. More and more people are turning to reviews to help decide their purchases. In fact, 93% of Millennials say that they read reviews before they purchase something.
A negative online review isn't the end of the world.
Think about it—wouldn’t you trust what your friend said about a new restaurant over what the restaurant says about themselves? Just because they say they have the best burritos in the city doesn’t mean they’re worth trying. They might be awful. That’s why you ask around, to see if anyone you know has been there before you go. This is what online reviews do for consumers. They allow them to get information from a third party before they spend their money.

As a business, you want online reviews. You want your happy customers to tell others about your company and your products/services. But what happens when you get a not so nice review? Well, you need to address it! Having a bad online review about your company floating around out there can turn away potential customers. So, how do you combat these reviews if you can’t just get rid of them?

Here are seven tactics you can try.

7 ways to handle bad online reviews.

Look internally

The first thing that we would recommend you do when you get a bad online review is to seriously consider what the review is saying. Put yourself in the shoes of the reviewer. Maybe they’re just being unreasonable, but they just might be showing you a real problem with your service.

Take a hard look at your company. You want to try to see things from the other side, not through your own rose-colored glasses. Maybe it’s time to rethink some of your processes or your customer service.

Contact the reviewer ASAP

After getting a bad online review, you want to contact that person as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter who’s wrong in the situation. You need to reach out to them. Even if they’re wrong, you want to do everything in your power to make it right somehow. The more you do to make it right, the more they’ll appreciate it and rethink their review.

Think of this as an investment into your reputation. Just reaching out can do a lot to repair relationships and help them view you more favorably. Even if you can’t make things right with them, reaching out and trying to make things right will show other potential customers that you care.

Ask for a revision of the bad online review

After you reach out to the reviewer and try to make things right, consider thinking about asking them to revise their review. A customer can revise their review, remove the review or even post a follow-up. Now, this would be ideal if you made the situation better for them and they were genuinely happy with your response. However, if they don’t seem happy even after you reach out, it might be not ideal to ask them. They might just write something worse or something else that could further damage your online reputation.
Google online review stars

Acknowledge the problem

We’ve already told you that you need to reach out to the reviewer and try to make things right with them. However, there are times when you just can’t make it up to them. It might be that it was a time-sensitive situation and you just can’t make that situation right.

You still need to acknowledge what happened. Make sure you apologize for the experience they had and try to do everything you can to assure them it won’t happen again. Tell them that you are going to review your policies and maybe even ask for a second chance to make it up to them.

Whatever you do, make sure you are always pleasant with the customer. There is no need to be rude or short with them; if you reply with irritation it’s counterproductive, especially if you respond that way online. Be nice and genuine with them. Sometimes, just acknowledging a problem can show them that you respect them and their experience.

Address false reviews

There are normal negative reviews, and then there are just false reviews. Maybe you have a testy former employee who is out for revenge or maybe a ruthless competitor is trying to steal your business. In situations like that, you need to address those reviews with the site they’re on.

If you find reviews that are just unreal, check out the site’s policies. If it’s allowed, contact them and request intervention. You can check out Google’s policies here.

How to deal with bad online reviews? Here’s how!

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Get Positive

9 of 10 people trust online reviews.As we’ve said, you can expect a few bad online reviews. And, honestly, they aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some people will find it a little fake if you only have glowing reviews. Most of the time, your potential customers are going to have the common sense to read a negative review and understand that some people are just grumpy or looking for attention.

What can really help with this is having more positive reviews that will overshadow the negative ones. If you have a hundred positive reviews and two negative ones, most people will see that you are generally liked.

If you currently don’t have positive reviews, then you need to work on getting them ASAP. But how do you get positive reviews? There are ways that you can encourage your customers to review you.

Encourage Customers to Review You

  • Ask Them: You can always ask your customers to review you. However, you need to be careful. According to Google’s guidelines, you can’t offer any incentives for reviews.
  • POP Display: Create point of purchase displays that ask them to review you. Make sure you first identify the top places that your customers come in contact with you.
  • Email Them: You can use your email marketing to help you gain reviews. You can email them and ask by putting a link at the bottom of your email.
  • Frequent Flyers: Ask those who are repeat customers. If they keep coming back to you, chances are that they like you and will be glad to leave you a review.
  • Social Media: You can ask your followers on social media to review you, but you want to make sure that you don’t make it too easy to also leave negative reviews.

If you can’t beat them, outrank them

If you find that you have a negative review on just one site, you can work on outranking that site and pushing them down the SERPs. Obviously, for this to work, you need to have positive reviews on other sites. In order to make this work, link to the positive reviews on your website and social media. Then, start doing a little undercover promotion of these sites.

Even better  might be to outrank their review with new positive reviews on the same site. Those will appear above the bad review and if you get enough of them they might even push the negative review off the page.

Online Reputation Management

Handle online reviews well and see your business grow.Online reputation management is defined as “a strategy and process of monitoring, identifying, and influencing your digital reputation and credibility online.” By now I’m confident you understand that you need to know what people are saying about you online. Your reputation is everything, in today’s competitive market. With more and more people trusting reviews, you really need to be paying attention to what people are saying about you online.

Monitoring your digital reputation and what people are saying about you online idn’t just about combating the bad online reviews. While that’s a great part of it, you can also gain insightful information from online reputation management: it gives you the ability to understand and benefit from what people are saying about you

Say you are a plumbing company in Atlanta who’s monitoring tweets with [Plumbing + Atlanta], and you see that people are complaining that no other company will service a certain area. You might realize it really wouldn’t take much to go to that area. Now you’ve tapped into a brand new market and outsmarted your competition.

Conclusion

Don’t think it’s the end of the world when you get a bad online review. One or two aren’t going to kill your business, but you do need to be mindful of the customer and the situation. Make sure you contact them and do everything you can to make it right. Sometimes, just showing you care can make all the difference.

About the Author: l Thanks to Ron Dod for this post and for his patience with my gentle editing. He’s a partner and CEO of Visiture, LLC.  He holds a Masters in the Science of Marketing from Florida State University and is certified in Google Adwords & Analytics.

We have a program specially designed for online review management of  local businesses. Call me and ask about it!

Find other posts on the subject of reviews here.

Think we can benefit with your experience with bad online reviews? Please share in the comments below.

Think others can benefit from the information here? Please share it with the buttons on the left. Or give us a +1 or a Like at the top of the page.

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  • October 18, 2024
    Dr. Anthony S
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    Rank Magic
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Are Website Sliders Hurting Your Visibility and Conversions?

/ page content, SEO practices, user experience, web design / Leave a Comment

Sliders may be cool, but be careful.Sliders are cool.

Sliders are an increasingly popular technique on websites. You know, the rotating images with compelling marketing text that scroll across the top of a web page. Four or five seconds of one marketing message or feature promotion followed by four or five seconds of another, and so forth for anywhere from three to a half dozen or more before the rotation starts all over again. Many websites do this on their home page, but some sites repeat the same slider progression on just about every page.

But sliders can hurt your conversions

My cool sliders are bad for me? Who knew?Customers are impatient

For one thing, images contain a lot of bytes, and the more images on a page, the longer it takes for the page to appear on a customer’s browser. If your page takes two or three seconds to download, that’s not a problem.

But if it takes five to ten seconds to download, impatient or time-stressed customers may well bail on you before the page finishes loading, and go back to the search results to find a better page. When that happens, you’ve lost the customer.

Customers only react to your first slide

Another concern is that customers almost never see anything past the first or second slide in your sliders. They may look at the first one for a few seconds, read it or even click on it for more information. But customers who are looking for what you promote on the second slide or the third may never see them. Why? Because they’re in a hurry and want to see if you provide what they need. So they scroll down your page quickly, moving the slider up and out of sight. They may never even realize it was a slider with more information than they absorbed in the first three or four seconds on your page. It’s no wonder that research demonstrates very few people ever click on any slide past the first one.

Subsequent slides don’t make your page any stickier

Research has shown that you have less than three seconds to convince someone they’re in the right place. That means most people are deciding whether to stay on your site before your second slide ever appears.

And sliders can hurt your SEO, too

Perhaps not this dramatically, but sliders can reduce your search visibility.Sad, but true: having sliders on your pages runs the risk of sabotaging your search engine visibility. One of the more recent and increasingly important ranking factors at Google is page speed: how quickly your page downloads into a visitor’s browser. This is so important that Google has published a page to help you understand your page speed and how to improve it.

Beyond that, when someone is looking for information you cover in later slides that they just don’t see, they are inclined to hit the back button to select something from the search results. When they do that, that’s called a bounce, and that, too, is a negative ranking factor.

How to fix it?

There are a number of alternatives to sliders that don’t carry problems for your rankings and conversions.

Hero image

This is a single large image at the top of your page that conveys the primary message of the page. You’ll find a good example of that on our own home page. Chances are each of your slider images links to a topical page within your website that focuses on the topic of the slide. Take those slides and turn each one into a hero image on the page it matches. Here’s an example of an excellent hero image on a website’s home page:

Collage or image array

This is like it sounds: one image made up of other images or pieces of them, or a number of separate, static images on your page.
This collage image is made up of separate photos, and is better than having a rotating slide show on your home page.

Call to action and/or request form

A static image with either a contact request form or a call to action can be very effective, too.
Calls to action to call and to click to learn more.
If you’ve got sliders on your site, consider replacing them with one of the alternatives above. It just may help both your search visibility and your conversion rate.

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