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  • January 10

Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Usability edition

usability

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 third of a five part series detailing five major factors in boosting the effectiveness of your SEM. The first part, on boosting targeted traffic, can be found here. The second part, on identifying and directing visitor intent, can be found here.

Usability

Oh what a prickly word. Some in the SEO world consider usability to be one of those, um, nasty 9 letter words. However, if you want to earn money off of your website you are going to get used to it. It’s more than just offering a clean and simple interface. Sometimes sheer attractiveness helps a site maintain usability, as well.

Without proper usability the best search optimized site does not earn money. So, what can you do to ensure proper usability? We need consumers on the page. We don’t want them leaving due to the lack of an obvious visual cue. Here are some things you can do.

1. Eye-catching images – Use an eye-catching image to illustrate the top of a page. Avoid cliche photography or else you’ll look like someone still using Photoshop to make birthday party invitations. You don’t want to be alone on your birthday, do you?

2. Declare – Declare the topic and purpose of a page is in the headline and also the page title. It may seem like overkill, but you never where eyes are going to roam to on a page.

3. Call to action – Make a call to action as simple as humanly possible. Add a clearly visible and button-like call to action above the fold/scroll of your page, something like “call now toll free”, “subscribe now”, “download the free version.” Get creative, but simple.

4. Limit clicks – Get users to the finish line in as few clicks as possible. Give them as few chances as possible to close the window. This is a no brainer but it’s really important.

5. White space – This is a controversial one, but some experts believe if you add a significant amount of white space to your page, it gives people’s eyes something to rest on. A restful eye keeps on click, click, clicking.

These are some great tips for maximizing the usability of your web enterprise. Tune in next time when we’ll tackle that great white beast, how to land page optimization.




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