Marketing Made Easy

A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t relypurely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pagesfor search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well asputting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable aspossible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and thenleaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s notgoing to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, exposethem to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid ina candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to seewhich pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for thesepages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed toconvert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content ->Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. Theseare the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through.Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is thepercentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at anotherpage on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (ornot) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’remissing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. Thisis vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential toconverting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is itsignificantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so,it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the questionthey had when they clicked through.Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve thisarticle: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, anddon’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, asimple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can beuseful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post,to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Arepeople mostly finding the article through Google images? This mightaccount for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise thearticle. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe youwant to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it moreappealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design isunattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on thepage. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other contenton your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in andcategory list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax yourreader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may wantto use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page.Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, andyou can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the beforeand after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the ContentDetail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set thedate for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but notincluding that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor orExcel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, BounceRate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after youoptimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen anincrease in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly adecrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that morereaders are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conductfurther research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you havelinks to other content on your blog, and that the wording of yourarticle makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure toaim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitorliterally only wanted one piece of information, and left because theygot it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will beimportant. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-wordkeyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce ratefor a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too –‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say,‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybeyou’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case StudyI performed a landing page analysis analysis onGenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by farwas my post on personal strengths and weaknesses.This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accountsfor 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rateand time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

Time on Page – 00:01:35Bounce Rate – 86.67%Exit % – 82.98%I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom ofthe page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and gota few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading tothe bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected fromthe poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengthsthan I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around yourweaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrotethe post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths andweaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but notgiving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my sitethat cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

Time on Page – 00:02:31Bounce Rate – 66.67%Exit % – 66.20%Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reducedby 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little moretweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion thatarticle’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur wouldsay personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entranceanalysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measureeverything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com