Is your landing page bouncing?

What makes a website attract enquiries?  Is it the sheer number of people being attracted to a website?  Is it the number of customer testimonials displayed?  Is it making it clear what geographical areas the company covers?  Actually, it’s a mixture of those and numerous other factors all combined.  Of primary importance though is to have a website that makes people want to click beyond the page that they initially land on, i.e. you don’t want people to ‘bounce’ off after landing.  For every company, it’s imperative to spend just a bit of time analysing the numbers of website visitors that do or don’t get further than the page they initially landed on.

First things first, do you have statistics that tell you how many people are landing on certain pages of your website, and how many of them get further than each landing page?  If you don’t then ask us how.  The figures you see may make you smile or frown.  For now, forget how people then navigate through your website – the focus here is purely on ensuring that people find good enough reason to click beyond the page they landed on.

While you could never expect 100% of people who land on your website to then move onto other pages, you should set some minimum expectations.  It’s actually not uncommon for 10%, 20%, 30% of people to go no further than their landing page but when the percentages start to creep above that then there should be cause for worry.  This is particularly important if you’re using something like PPC advertising because if you’re paying for those clicks to your website and many of them aren’t getting beyond the landing page then that’s money down the drain.

Your objective should be to make changes to your landing page so that people have a better experience and so want to click further than the page they landed on.  To achieve this takes analysis and tweaks.  You don’t necessarily need the paid expertise of people like Custwin to get started because although that expertise would get you faster results, the ‘free’ route may be slower but can get you heading in the right direction.   Here are the recommended steps you can take …

1. Assess, over a reasonable period of time (anything from two weeks to a month), the percentage of website visitors that go no further than your landing page.  Make an allowance for irrelevant traffic (e.g. search engine spiders, students researching a subject, competitors), and come up with a figure that you think shows the true rate of people going no further than that landing page.  This is your benchmark.

2. Search online for similar businesses to yours and look at their websites and note down elements that you think are strong.  Don’t do anything with these yet.

3. Ask your contacts and friends to look at your website landing page and ask them not for compliments but just one or two things that they think would deter a potential client.  By asking them to be constructively negative they will consider you to be serious about business and will be happy to help.

4. Combine the input from your friends and contacts with your own observations about competitors websites and see if there are any consistent issues being raised.

5. If there’s feedback that’s consistent and is easy to fix on your landing page then implement that first of all.  Then take just one other observation and make that change.  Please don’t attempt to implement everything as you won’t know what worked and what didn’t (and sometimes you can make it worse).

6. Assess over a period of a month what difference those changes have made to the percentage of people getting further than the landing page of your website.  In theory, if you’ve had the right feedback, it should have improved.

7. After that month assessment period, and having seen improvement, implement the next change to your landing page and leave it a further period to assess how that has an impact on the percentage of people who get further than your landing page.

8. And so on …

The actual changes you make will depend on the input you get from people, your own observations, and if you use them, the input from website profitability experts.  The changes can range from the very simple (e.g. links to pages deeper within the website, testimonial comments from clients) to the more detailed (e.g. creating video to go on the landing page).   What’s important is to analyse the dropout rate from landing pages and then take actions, however small, so that you feel as if progress is being made one month down the line.

Back to top^

The power of imagery

If you speak to any photographer they’ll tell you that it’s important to have great imagery in your marketing materials/website and although it’s easy to think “yeah, yeah, you just want to make money from me”, they’re right because there’s an amazing power in imagery.

Let’s say, for example, that a nutritionist has a website and within one of those pages they want to get across the concept of why it’s important to eat 5-a-day fruit and vegetables.   They have the following choices:

1. Use no imagery and just focus the website page on the facts about 5-a-day.

2. Use standard imagery of a mixture of fruit and vegetables.

3. Use something that grabs peoples attention, such as that mixed picture of apple and orange could perhaps do.

People spend much of their time skipping from one website to another and companies need to use any methods possible to keep people’s attention on their website.  It could be just strong imagery in general or it could be quirky as with the example above.  Royalty-free image libraries (such as www.istockphoto.com and others), which charge a minimal amount per image downloaded, are well worth browsing through to get inspiration.

Is your website in need of a boost through imagery?  If you think it may be then it could be worth you taking a bit of time to have a look around, perhaps also to discuss with any photographers you know.  Even if you change just one image on your website it could make the difference that keeps the attention of website visitors and so lead to more business for you.

Back to top^

Twitter and Google

In the August newsletter it was recommended that companies grab as many Twitter names as possible.  Part of the reason for doing so was the educated guess that, over time, Google would take a bigger interest in Twitter and therefore, users of Twitter would gain more prominence in search results.  Things have accelerated faster than expected and although Google hasn’t bought Twitter (yet), it’s going to be including tweets in the search results. 

The purpose appears to be more from a ‘social’ viewpoint and the example given in the Google blog was that “the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”, but it’s blatantly clear how this can extend to business.

Taking that ‘ski resort’ example, suppose someone is searching Google and types something like ‘Innsbruck snow conditions’, the opportunity is there for a business (e.g. a bar, ski hire place, etc.) to be supplying updates on those snow conditions, via Twitter, probably encouraging people to click through to their website, and at the same time offering some form of discount to people who, having read the tweet, are highly likely to be visiting there.

Many in the marketing world are dismissing Twitter as having little relevance for business.  They’re sadly misguided and the announcement that Google will be featuring tweets in search results will create a boost in interest from companies that want to be capitalising on what Custwin view will be major opportunities to keep ahead of competitors.

Do you want to gain some insights into how Twitter could boost your business?  Speak to us without obligation to see how Twitter can become a part of the marketing channels you use to attract business.

Back to top^

Blogs - get to the top of Google

Talking to someone recently, the feedback was gained of “we will never use blogs for our business – there’s no value to it”.  So it’s worth looking at how they CAN be of use to any business.   There are many benefits from blogs but the focus here is purely on creating them so that they get you top of the Google results (or at least, high), for particular phrases that people could type into Google.   Here’s an example of this in action.

A recent Custwin Blog was created not just to provide useful information, but to demonstrate a point about how blogs can help get strong search engine positioning.  That blog can be seen here at http://www.custwin.co.uk/blog/2009/10/07/backlinks-to-websites-bad-for-business/.  It’s quite detailed, but in a nutshell focuses on why the Google criteria for ranking websites is flawed – focusing in particular on backlinks.  It’s purpose is to make people think “Custwin have an opinion plus certain level of expertise, and so may be worth keeping track of, and potentially be of use in the future”.

The title of that blog was created as ‘Backlinks to Websites – Bad for Business?’, which is a title that deliberately includes ‘backlinks to websites’ as a phrase and is worded to be confrontational (because everyone assumes that backlinks are supposed to be good for business).

So, people on Google who are interested in the subject of backlinks to websites may type a range of phrases (e.g. ‘website backlinks’ and ‘backlinks websites’) but the chosen wording was ‘backlinks to websites’ (plural rather than singular, although it would have worked either way).  If you type that phrase into Google you get the following search result:



This means that anyone typing ‘backlinks to websites’, for as long as it takes for someone else to take that top spot in Google, will see the Custwin blog entry and may click through to find out more.

OK, that’s just one example but the principle is this …

By creating a strong flow of blogs on a company website, and focusing those blogs so that they include phrases that people may potentially type into Google, there is high potential to get good search positioning.  For every blog you create, each focusing on a slightly different subject, you have an extra bit of visibility in Google.  Let’s say you did 100 blogs in a year – that’s 100 opportunities to be highly visible in Google when people type particular phrases.  Out of all the clicks you get to your blog you’ll get a small number who go on further by signing up to receive blog feeds, perhaps signing up for an email newsletter, and in some cases making contact.   Those numbers will still be comparatively small but the initial creation of the blogs brings you to the attention of those people and if they like what you say then you can pull them in to see more of what you have to say and therefore have the potential to turn them into clients/useful contacts at some point in the future.

Turning that on its head, if you’re not taking advantage of blogs in such a way then you’re missing out on huge opportunities and it’ll only be a matter of time before your competitors start to capitalise on those opportunities.

Back to top^

Website bottlenecks

Continuing on from the article about modifying website landing pages so that more people get beyond that landing page, it’s worth taking that principle further and applying it to any page within your website.   The first thing you need to do is ensure that you’ve got the ability to analyse which parts of your website are bottlenecks and stop many people from making contact with you/buying from you.  If you don’t have a website statistics analysis system then ask us what to do (without obligation to use our services).

Let’s say that you’ve identified that a particular page of your website is a bottleneck.  People are looking at various pages but when they get to one particular point, they go no further (or at least, high percentages of them go no further). 

Taking the principles of the first article this month you need to get a view of what isn’t working on that particular website page and to start making changes.

To give a few examples …

1. There may be a ‘view our client case studies’ link on a page, which is good customer focus, but it could be that if that link was presented as a nice graphic, that more people would notice it and so click on it.

2. There may be one or more images on the bottleneck website page and by changing them for something else may have a positive impact.

3. If the page has pricing on it and you think that may be deterring some people from investigating further, but aren’t sure whether it’s the pricing or something else on the page that’s deterring them, then move the pricing to another page so that you eliminate that as being a problem on the bottleneck page.

4. People may be looking for some form of guarantee from you – by creating a guarantee page on the website and including a clear link to it on the bottleneck page, you will at least see whether people are looking for that guarantee or whether there are still other problems with the bottleneck page.

Understanding what’s ‘wrong’ with certain pages of websites is a bit of an artform.  For us, we can see within seconds what’s missing from any website page but that’s because it’s our livelihood. It’s also much easier when you’re not heavily involved in a business because the focus can then be purely “what would a potential customer think?”.  What’s important to focus on though are the website statistics figures – if a page is a bottleneck that stops you gaining more business then it needs to be addressed and, as with the first article this month, the only way to address it is to make small changes, reassess whether the page is still a bottleneck, and then making more changes as required.  Over a period of time the website page will cease to be a bottleneck.

Even those websites that are gaining strong levels of business will be continually testing and tweaking – never satisfied with the results being gained.  Websites like Amazon and the BBC have gone through extensive levels of analysis to get them to the level that they’re at but they won’t be resting on their laurels.  For us mere mortals in the real world of business the process is much slower than the mighty big websites but those who analyse where their website bottlenecks are, and start a process of tweaking and re-analysing, will be those who gain the business and so make it harder for their competitors to succeed.   At Custwin, we have proven over and over again that analysis of website statistics and making the necessary changes is what gets results and makes huge differences to the levels of enquiries and business that can be gained.

Your mission is to implement even minor changes to pages that you identify as bottlenecks so that you can see (from statistics) that those changes have had a positive effect.  Just those seemingly small initial actions will put you on the path to ever increasing success from your website.

Back to top^