A Deeper Look At Keyword Intent and Bounce Rates

Posted by admin on August 29, 2011 under Bing, Coding, Google, Keyword Research, Search Engines, SEO, Web Design, Yahoo! | Read the First Comment

Locating the right keywords are imperative to your SEO success. A lot of people lose focus on a visitors intent instead of really looking at why a person is searching for a specific keyword.  Someone searching for “bears” is probably looking for something different than some searching for “Chicago Bears.”  While this seems like a “no brainer”, I see it all of the time when I ask clients to tell me what keywords that they would like to rank for.  I know that their suggestions will be far fetched and way too broad, but that’s because people don’t understand how a search engine has to analyze intent.  And that’s fine, because I’m more curious as to where the person’s head is at.

This conversation is a good example of how humans might process information.

A friend comes to you and says, “I saw a bear.”
“Wow.”, you say. “Where?”
“Across the street!”
“Across the street from here?”
“No. Up in the mountains.”
“What mountains?”
“In Helen, Georgia.”
“Was it a big bear?”
“Huge!”
“What kind of bear was it?”
“No idea.”
“Well, what color was it?”
“It was a black bear.”

While this conversation may seem silly, it could have been avoided if the person simply started the conversation by saying, “I saw a huge black bear across the street when I was up in the mountains of Helen, Georgia.”  At that point, you have all of the information that you need.  However, this is the exact same thing that happens when a person puts broad keywords into a search engine.  They may have a vision of the results they expect to see, but they simply put “bear” in the search window without giving the search engine the data it needs to know the whole story.  Depending on the broadness of the keyword will determine how much interpretation the search engine has to do.

This is why website siloing is so important is because it allows you to start broad, but still lead the visitor down certain paths depending on more specific data. It’s also why keyword research is so very important. You may think you want to rank for “bear”, but if your website focuses only on Georgia black bears, you’ll kill yourself trying to rank for “bear”.  Then you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why “Build a Bear”, the “Chicago Bears”, “Bear Bryant” and tons of other sites outrank you. And unless you expand your content to include all things “bear”, they always will. This also goes back to building out the respective areas for specific terms and then optimizing those areas for those longer tail keywords such as “Helen Georgia black bears”.

Customer Intent (But what did you really mean?)

This brings us to customer intent. What did the searcher really want to find? But more importantly, does your website capitalize on that intent? And if it does, can it capitalize on it even more than it already does?

For instance, if a person searches for “windows”, are they trying to find a glass window or are they looking for something to do with the Windows software? You would definitely know if the person used the keyword in “plate glass windows”, but now you don’t know what they want with plate glass windows. Do they want to find more info on types of plate glass windows? Do they want someone to install them? Are they looking for pricing? How can you know for sure? The answer is in your Analytics.

Your best bet is to look at the keyword area under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics (assuming that you’ve installed it). You’ll see that people arrived to your site using a variety of keywords and your telltale sign is in the column called “bounce rate”. When a person “bounces”, they are leaving your site within a pre-defined time frame (typically under 5 seconds).  The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant that page probably is to the term they searched for.

However, it doesn’t always mean that it’s not relevant. If the person has searched specifically for “toddler girl dresses” and your page is all about “toddler girl dresses”, then maybe there could be something else on that page is turning them off.   The page could be taking too long to load (check Google Webmaster Tools). Maybe your pricing is too high (try doing some A/B split testing using Google Website Optimizer). Maybe your designs or selection sucks (more A/B split testing). Either way, you should always pay attention to how the person arrived at your page in the first place and pay close attention to keywords that have high bounce rates.

Alternately, if you see a high bounce rate for “blue toddler girl dresses“, and you have 4 blue toddler girl dresses, it’s once again time to analyze why.  Are those blue dresses mixed in with dozens of dresses of another color? If there’s a substantial amount of traffic bouncing for blue toddler girl dresses, maybe it’s time to move your blue dresses onto their own page. That way you can optimize that specific page for various blue dresses keyword terms and start landing those sales.

“Well, I did that and now they’re not bouncing, but they’re still not buying.”  If that’s the case, then you should start looking at your sales funnel. You have that set up, right?  If not, you should head to the Goals area of Google Analytics and get cracking.  Once you have that set up, you can see where they’re leaving the sales process. If they leave before anything even goes in the cart, then maybe it’s your pricing. If they leave on the shipping page, then maybe your shipping cost is too high.  If you end up in that conundrum, than it’s time to fire up Google Website Optimizer and do some A/B split testing and start analyzing different shipping or pricing.

The beauty of all of this is that it’s readily available to you for free via Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.  So if your sales have slowed down, or you simply can’t even get found on the web, it’s time to research your site structure first, then your page structure, and then the content of those pages. In that order. If you don’t analyze and test, you’re leaving major money on the table.

Was Your Site Mauled By Google’s Panda?

Posted by admin on March 11, 2011 under Coding, Google, Search Engines, SEO, Web Design | Be the First to Comment

To start, there is a very detailed investigation done by Vanessa Fox that really delves deep into the Google Panda update, but I have no intentions of going that deep for you, the basic reader.  Reading her novella on the issue turns me on, but would probably make you sleepy.  So here’s the short of it.  If you got hit by the Google Panda update and saw your rankings plummet, it’s because of low quality, unoriginal content. And if you read Vanessa’s post on this, you’d know how insultingly short that statement really is, but that’s the extent of it.

Google launched an algorithm update called Panda and it affected more websites than they probably expected.  The update was in response to the overwhelming presence of spammy scraper websites that “scraped” their content from other sites.  It affected the sites where the content is primarily duplicate content and who get their popularity from worthless spam links.  These types of sites dominated the search engine results while sites that spent quality time creating unique content struggled to get on page one while they watched these other spam sites flourish.  It seems like a well needed update, but there was tiny problem that Google probably didn’t foresee or maybe they did.

Some of the sites that were caught in this cleansing probably didn’t deserve to be and they were “work from home” resellers.  Those overnight pop-up websites like the Tom Bosley pushed SMC sites were a prime example.  But it’s not the sellers fault.  They just want to make money online and are romanced by the get rich quick mermaid songs.  And there are many companies that operate just like them on a smaller scale. A very large portion of resellers get their content from the manufacturer of their products via CD’s or downloads that they in turn upload to their websites.  That means that multiple websites will have the same exact content since all of the product descriptions and photos are the same.  Since the Panda update was designed to clear out websites that duplicated content, many online retailers got slapped and literally disappeared off of the rankings into the land of double and triple digits.  Whether or not Google foresaw this problem is unknown and whether they plan to fix it is even more of a mystery.

If you’ve been hit due to spam links, it will be a vicious uphill battle to undo the problem and especially if you have an external linking company buying or submitting link requests on your behalf. Your best bet is to cut them off and ask them to stop the black hat tactics or you’re going to get buried in Google penalties. Acquire your links naturally through hard work and social media and you’ll reap the benefits sooner than you think. The Panda update has less to do with this and more to do with the content issues, so let’s talk about that for now.

If you’re a retailer that has experienced the problem of your site being penalized for duplicate content, tell us about it.  Meanwhile, you should dedicate some time to manually change your product descriptions as soon as possible and swapping out your images with alternate photos (if you have the capability to do so).  It may be time to dig into your analytics and see what pages took the hit, because most likely the slap are page specific and don’t typically apply to the entire site. Unless your entire site sucks.  Start with your best selling products first and work your way down from there.   If you have the means, you should also consider adding content like in-depth reviews or blog posts to the product pages.  The goal here is to differentiate yourself from the original content you received from your manufacturer and especially if it constitutes the majority of your website.  And the next time you get a CD or downloadable update from them, be sure to copy your changes over or risk overwriting your changes.

Google will always side on the mantra that content is king.  Gone are the days of plopping down a website, uploading content and raking in the money.  Google is apparently insisting that you work for it.