January 9

Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Traffic edition

Traffic lights SEO

Modern SEM practices suggest that lowering bounce rates and raising conversion rates are both key to putting giant smiley faces on your web revenue forecasts. Rankings don’t mean much when your visitors bounce off to spend their money somewhere else. Some might argue that improving bounce rate and conversion rate is more about web analytics or even overall online marketing, but come on, we all know it’s more than that.

This is the first of a five part series detailing five major factors in boosting the effectiveness of your SEM.

Boosting Targeted Traffic

This is probably the most obvious of the bunch. Visitors can’t stay or convert into customers without, well, stopping by in the first place. You can’t eat a hot, fresh pizza until it shows up at your door, right? Well, unless you had a coal oven or something. But I digress. You need to get people to your site, whether via search, social media, bookmarks, links or even the direct “type in” way. However, you don’t want any old visitor. You want someone who will benefit your business, or someone who will send the link to someone they know that could benefit your business. You want targeted traffic. How to make that happen?

1. Optimize – Optimize for one main keyword or phrase per page. Also,try not to do more than three or four throughout your entire site. It’ll muck up the waterworks.

2. Twitter - The popular social media site isn’t just for vapid celebrities and boring friends telling you what they just ate for dinner. Use it to your advantage. Gain followers with like-minded interests and direct them to your site.

3. Find a niche – Sign up to niche social sites that attract like-minded individuals. For instance, if you are a video game retailer, you should start posting on various related message boards. Tag every post with your URL, be friendly and try not to look stupid.

4. Find your customers – This goes above and beyond message boards. Google pertinent phrases. Scour Yahoo Answers for pertinent questions. Do everything it takes to lure consumers out of their many e-nooks and e-crannies.

5. Become a guru – Most importantly, and going back to not looking stupid on message boards, is to become a guru. Or at least appear to be one. Your webstock will raise dramatically if people start assuming you are the go-to site in your field. Gather up a large and related RSS feed and begin reading. If you know it, they will come.

That’s it for now. Next time we’ll tackle the tricky proposition of identifying and swaying visitor intent. Until then.