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What is bounce rate and how does it affect your site?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people visiting your site and then immediately leaving. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can identify what search engines show the highest bounce rates. For example, it could show that Bing is delivering a 75% Bounce Rate. This means that 75% of the visitors coming from Bing to your website during the date range you have selected are visiting one page and then leaving your site.

Depending on how your Google Analytics account is set up, this may include closing the browser, directly typing in a different site’s URL into their browser’s navigation bar, or clicking on a link to one of your social media sites or off-site blog. This third case is important to note, because unless Google Analytics has been set-up to track these off-site channels as part of the account, a visitor will be considered a Bounce even though they are still interacting with channels your brand controls.

IS A HIGH BOUNCE RATE BAD?

A high Bounce Rate typically indicates that a visitor did not find the page they landed on relevant to what they were looking for. This is not always the case. If your blog is being tracked by Google Analytics and a visitor lands on one of your blog posts and the information they seek is clearly available, they may have no further interest in staying on your site. A low Bounce Rate, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean your users are happily engaged with your site. If you pair a low Bounce Rate with a high number of Page views and low conversions, your visitors may be frustrated and unable to find what they are looking for even after searching and are leaving your site unfulfilled.

So although these statistics are great, they can only be used as an estimate as you can never know the real reason for someone leaving or staying on your page, unless you asked them all individually.

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If you need a helping hand building an digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign! Digital marketing tactics we offer include web design and development, SEO services, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Google webmaster tools is an excellent tool to analyse your sites performance allowing you to identify the areas you need to improve on, and what’s going well.

These are the features that it includes:

• Submit/check the sitemap for your website.
• Adjust the crawl rate of the Google bots for your website and view the statistics.
• Generate/check the robots.txt file for your website.
• List the internal and external pages that link to your website.
• Check what keyword searches led the site to being displayed in the Google search engine results pages and click-through rates for them.
• Check statistics about how Google has indexed your website and whether it has found any issues while doing so.
• Set a preferred domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com over www.yourdomain.com or vice versa) which will determine how the site URL will be displayed in search engine results pages.

Google Webmaster Tools is a very popular solution for your website and it is highly recommended by webmasters. It will help you with the Search Engine Ranking Optimization of your website. You will be able to use it for a frequent analysis and for checking the statistics of your website. It gives you precise information how your website is indexed by Google and provides you with deep insights in case of an issue.

In order to use the Google Webmaster Tools for your website you need to confirm that you are the owner of the website and have full access to it. The process is absolutely automated and all you need to do is place a given text file in the Webroot directory for your website.

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit an XML sitemap for your website. This provides information about all pages on the website and making it easier and faster for Google bots to crawl and index it. You will also see more detailed information related to the indexing of your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provide a full list of the search phrases that result in your web site being displayed on the search engine results pages (SERPs). You will also receive full information about all internal and external links to your website, keywords, errors and missing pages. Such information is of upmost importance when you want to better optimize your website and have it displayed higher in the SERPs

In order to start using Google Webmaster Tools, you should create a new account (or use an existing one if you already have a Google account). Visit the Google Webmaster Tools web page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

You will be asked to log in or create a new account. The registration process is simple and you should not experience any troubles.

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A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, its job is to locate resources in a web page. A URL is a formatted text string used by web browsers, email clients and other software to identify a network resource on the internet. Network resources are files that can be plain Web pages, other text documents, graphics or programs.

There are two different types of URLs, absolute and relative. Here’s how you should use them:

If you’re creating a document that you want everyone, anywhere in the world to be able to access, then you need to make it an absolute URL. An Absolute URL will point you directly to the file/directory on the internet. It also means that if you have two URLs that are the exact same, they will point to the same file.

If you’re creating links to other files on the same server you need to use a relative URL as you’re already in the location the link is going to be.

URL Strings consist of three substrings:

• Network protocol
• Host name or address
• File or resource location

These substrings are separated by special characters:

Protocol:// host/ location

The protocol substrings are used to define a network protocol to find a resource. These strings are short names followed by three characters ‘://’. Typical protocol names are:
http:// ftp:// mailto://

The host substring identifies a computer or other network device. Hosts come from standard internet databases such as the domain name systems (DNS) and can also be names or an IP address. For example smartcowmarketing.com/home.aspx is the host for our site.

The location Substring is anything to after the domain suffix (‘.com’ etc.) For ‘smartcowmarketing.com/home.aspx’ the section of our URL highlighted in bold is the location of where you are in the website, in this example you would be at the home page.

Here is a list of the different resource prefixes:

• Http – a hypertext directory or document (such as a Web page)
• ftp – a directory of files or an actual file available to download
• Gopher – a gopher document or menu
• Telnet – a Unix-based computer system that you can log into
• News – a newsgroup
• WAIS – a database or document on a Wide Area Information Search database
• file – a file located on your hard drive or some other local drive

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If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Once you’ve set up you’re site, you’re going to know exactly how it works and what to do to test the functionality. For example when you enter keywords into a search engine, you’ll choose words you know will point you towards your site. However, this is going to be a lot different for everyone else. For example, if your website was a clothes shop and someone was trying to find a new pair of jeans, ASK THEM what they’re most likely to search when looking for this item, ask them whether or not they tend to look at ads on the side of the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs) and if the majority of people do, then you’ll know you need to have ads! Use the feedback you’re getting from the customers to help you to make the necessary changes.

There are many ways you can engage with your audience to ask them for feedback, a very simple way would be to post on social media, asking your followers to comment back with what they think the areas are that you can improve. Other ways would include email campaigns asking your customers to reply with their feedback.

Not everything is going to work perfectly straight away, there are going to be features of your website that users may not like. Take Facebook for example, when they make changes to their interface there is always people giving them feedback, not always positive, but they use this feedback as a way of knowing what they can do to help make it more of a user friendly experience. In some cases the feedback you may receive will come across negatively, but you need to respond politely and inform the customer that their feedback has been noted and you will try to the best of your knowledge to try and improve this.

Getting feedback is a key part of Search Engine Optimization, it tells the search engines that you’re website or social media is kept up to date and also that other people are interacting with you, therefore your information must be useful. This will all help in ranking your site above your competitors.

Prompting your customers to leave reviews about your company on your Google+ local page should be your first priority.

Try to make it simple for your customers to leave reviews – if you have a database of email addresses, filter out the customers who have a Google Mail account and point them in the direction of your Google + Local company page. Reviews left from people with an active user account and Google + profile are likely to appear more authoritative. Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we also do free website reviews. If that is something you think you would be interested in, get in touch with us today.

It is also beneficial for people to leave reviews about your company on a selection of trusted online business listings and social hubs. Sites such as Yelp, Qype, Four Square and Trip Advisor, with an active and varied community, are at the forefront of local-social search.

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If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.