High Bounce off the Search Engine

by Glenn Hefley

Often we read or hear about the importance of Key Words for our web sites. SEO’s and Web Marketing ‘Specialists’ write a lot of articles and push this need down our throats every time we talk to them. Its the talisman of success on the web.

Are they wrong?

Not really, but where they often fail is in giving us the whole story.

Let’s say that we are selling car accessories, just as an example I happen to have done some recent research on. Our car accessories however don’t cover a wide area of the category. We sell car covers, floor mats, dash covers, and other items that protect our car. This is our focus.

Car Accessories however is a huge category and the search report on Overture tells us that 110,320 searches were done for that combination in June of 2006.

Putting what we read together, and what SEO’s tell us, we focus our web content on the key words “car accessories” and variations of the same. We get ourselves listed in the directories under Car Accessories, follow all of the suggestions and make it to the top ten.

Web Page Relevance

Search engines like Google and MSN don’t just go by key words. If that was the case they would be useless, like they were back in the early and mid 90’s. Google doesn’t just go by Page Rank either, again if that was the case, the search results would not be as good as they are. We need to remember that these search engines have been parsing and indexing web pages for relevant terms for a long time.

A page not only has to have good content, Page Rank, and key words, but needs to be relevant to the user to maintain good listing on the search engine for a long period of time.

Site Bouncing

There is a statistic that is in just about every Analytics program out there for web sites (at least any analytics program that is any good). It is called the Bounce Rate, or Page Bounce Report.

A Bounce is just like it sounds. The web searcher has hit your website from her search, sees it is not what she is looking for and hits back on the search engine in under 10 seconds.

After a time, the search engine begins to notice high levels of bouncing on a website, and tracks the searches used which caused the bounce. Then it takes action by moving the listing down the results page, or removing it completely for those key words.

Back to our Site

What happens is that we were high on the list yesterday, and now we aren’t there at all, and nothing has changed on our web site. We ask what happened? Our SEO’s don’t tell us. They did their job and they got paid. We were, after all, at the top of the search results.

Key Word Management

Key Word and content management is an on going job. You need to track high
levels of bouncing on your website and note the key word searches that are bringing
in bouncing results. If you aren’t then you are going to be in for a rude awakening
some day.

If any of your pages are getting bounce rates of over 30% from a set of key
words, and you are getting a great deal of traffic to that page from those key
words, then you need to do something fast or your whole web site will suffer.

Common Causes of High Bounce :

• Bad links or missing pages
• Out of date content
• Site focus or offering is narrow inside a large category
• Web site is marketing to a large category, which it has little to do with
• Poor Content
• Poor Design

Those aren’t in any particular order. Content is king, so if your content isn’t
keeping them there, then change the content. Get a professional writer in there
who understands web writing.

If your site has a large amount of hits for missing pages, get pages of content
in there where those missing pages are. Remember that if you pull a page, the
web search engines will still have that page in the index for months afterwards.
It is always better to simply change the content of a page, than to remove it
(really you should never have 404 Page Not found errors on your website. Its
death).

What ever the cause, find it, and fix it, or all of your work to date is going
to suffer for it.

Re-Building

There isn’t really a fast track fix for rebuilding after loosing web position
because of page bouncing. You may not loose Page Rank, but your website is going
to be hard pressed to get back into the main category again.

Re-building is also a two edge sword. Let’s say you do work the content, and
feed the engines and have blogs post articles and news sites post articles and
push the marketing; getting your website back into the main category. If you
haven’t fixed the problem, the page bounces are going to start happening again.

Always Market for Relevance

When you are picking your market focus, stay relevant. Don’t go for the big
categories unless you plan on supplying most of the interests in that category.
For our example of car accessories, for instance, you want your website to carry
just about every car accessory out there, and adding the new ones as they come
along. If you are only in a nitch, then your web pages and marketing efforts
should be focused on those nitch areas.

Always use professional, experienced web writers for your content.

Posted by Glenn Hefley in Glenn's Desk, Glenn's Work, Search Engines, Web Content