The most exciting website on the Internet may never receive any visitors. Unless people know it’s there, they won’t visit. Just like a “brick and mortar” retail store off the beaten track needs billboards, signage or other methods of attracting customers – so do websites.
Google is great, but even at best, your site is just one of a vast number of other sites that people will find when searching. You need more to stand out from the crowd.
We recently suggested to our clients that they put their website addresses on letterheads, business cards, email signatures, advertising, promotional products, and on their cars. We also suggested such things as contests to send traffic to their websites.
Make a great first impression, and you’ll get the benefit of the doubt next time. Make a poor first impression, and it takes an awful lot of positive experiences to turn it around. (Now there’s a blinding flash of the obvious!)
Not surprisingly, this works with websites as well.
What is quite surprising is just how quickly people get these first impressions when it’s a website. Read more…
Want to be at the top of Google? So do the other 16 million sites that come up when someone searches for your category!
If you only knew exactly what Google was looking for… but Google isn’t telling. There are 100 or so factors that can readily be measured for any web page, and experts in search engine optimization (SEO) disagree on the degree to which most of these factors influence a web page’s position in search engine results.
If experts disagree, what are we to do? Trying a few things, waiting a few months, and then trying different things is unlikely to be fruitful. Read more…
Scientific researchers studying how people use the Internet continue to tell us some things that we should have know, things we always suspected, and some things that might surprise us.
We should have known: You can’t control where people will arrive. Many websites are designed as though they were a book or pamphlet. But visitors to websites don’t necessarily, or even usually, start with page 1. 60% of website visitors go first to an interior page. Thank search engines for this — but make sure your interior pages are self-sufficient, and give your visitors an easy way back to the home page if they come in the “back door.”
We always suspected: You have to get the message across in the first screen. First-time website visitors spent an average of only 31 seconds on the home page of a website, and only 23% of visitors scrolled down at all. Of those who scrolled down, on average it was less than even another full screen.
It might surprise many: Most people don’t go back, and those who do spend less time. The researchers found that searchers visited an average of only 3.2 sites other than the search page itself, and of those who went on to a second or third site, only 12% went back to a previous one. Those who did go back spent 20% less time on the home page and were 30% less likely to scroll beyond the first screen than the first-time visitors.
The message for us…
Our web pages need to be brief and compelling, and the interior pages need to stand on their own. I suggest we think of web pages, especially home pages, as more like billboards than sales letters.