Make Your Site Sticky

The good news is that the search engine optimization and marketing campaign that was launched a little while ago is starting to generate traffic for your website. You’re getting visitors in increasing numbers each week and you’re steadily moving up on the search engine results pages. The bad news is that all the success in terms of increased traffic isn’t being matched by increases in conversions. Additional bad news comes via the site analytics which shows that a high percentage of your visitors are bouncing off of your site after a few seconds. What’s going on?

There are could be a few issues at work but they all revolve around a single factor; you have less than ten seconds to persuade a visitor to stay on your site. Here are a few fixes to make your site sticky and keep your visitors on the site long enough to leave their information or make a purchase.

Keep a laser focus on what your visitors are looking for when they arrive at your site. Visitors arriving via search engines are coming to your site as a result of the keywords you have optimized. Be sure that your landing page confirms for the visitor that their keyword search has been a success and that your site can provide what they’re looking for.

Most search engine visitors arrive at a site and their landing page without bias so it’s extremely important to make a good first impression. A professional look and feel can give a site immediate credibility and keep visitors from backing out of the site. Typos and mis-spellings, on the other hand can make a site look sloppy and amateurish, motivating visitors to bounce to other sites.

Make sure that visitors are landing on a page that is specifically relevant to their search term. Putting a buffet of products and services on a single landing page for a variety of keywords can be confusing for the visitor and make the site appear unfocused.

Content throughout the site must provide value to the visitor. Focus on helping the visitor buy your products and/or services by providing concise information to help the decision making process. To that end, offering a free report is a way to provide information and have the visitor leave theirs. Going with a hard sell will alienate a lot of visitors. Additionally, content that is stuffed with keywords may help with optimization but could lose the visitors if what they’re reading is awkward and/or nonsensical.

After informing your visitor that they have found what they’re looking for and providing them with high value information, make sure that you guide them through the conversion process. Provide simple step by step instructions with navigation that makes the conversion as easy as possible.

Making your site sticky will raise your conversion ratio immediately. Pay attention to your site analytics and continually work to shore up the areas of your site where bounces are concentrated. Testing for, and improving weaknesses, is a sure way to build a sticky site that will do everything you want it to do over the long run?

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