Five ways to improve your website's bounce rate (and why you should) by Syed Balkhi #452

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. And I'm Adam Gregory. Adam Gregory. That's right. He's an SEO guru here at eWebResults. Hi, and welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. I wanted to jump right into, it's a really short review. It's from Nejla Heidemann. And it is, of course, five stars. That was awesome. I love to listen to their podcasts and their professionalism. As you can see already, we are incredibly professional. We are broadcast. Punch in the face to them? Yeah, punch in the face to you, Nejla Heidemann, for that five-star review. We appreciate you. We are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas. And Adam and I, we actually, like, we are your results rebels. Everybody here at eWebResults is a results rebel. So, if you're tuning into the podcast for the first time, howdy. Welcome to the podcast. We're glad you're here. If you've tuned into the podcast before, you know what we're going to skip. Each and every week, we run a contest, and the contest goes like this. If we get a review, I just read one, and we get ten shikos. Adam, I mean, you're here. Not that many people have seen you on camera. You've been on camera on this podcast once. Once, the geofencing podcast. That was last year. Last year? Actually, that was almost a year ago, because I just did my year with the company last month. And you're like, welcome to the company, get on the podcast. Yes, basically. What is shikos? Shikos. Share, like, follow. There we go. And if you're doing a share, or a like, or a follow, in your head, you need to be hearing shikow. If we get ten shikos, and we get a review, then we skip the part where we tell you how to leave us a review to the end of the podcast. So, we're going to do that. What we will do, yeah, let's do that. Also, if you're tuning in again,

then you might be looking for tips. We have a lot of tips. You can get our resources. You can get our resource guides. You just need to go to, I think it's eWebResults.com slash tips. It's right there in my notes, slash tips. Lots of resources. I was actually in there the other day, and the team has built out so many different things. You're like, wow. Yeah, there's like a domain authority checker, keyword builder thing. It's just really cool, and there's lots of new tools coming. We could call that a keyword multiplexer. Yeah. I like that. I like the sound of that. So, basically, you take the keywords and then make all the iterations of separate keywords together. So, all of that is available at eWebResults.com slash tips. Today, we are reading an article from Saeed Balkhi. I think that's how you say his name. Punch in the face to you, Saeed. It's five ways to improve your website's bounce rate and why you should. And I know you've read this and come up with a lot of tips. Well, I mean, I spend all my time in the SEO realm. We actually have team SEO, team PPC here at eWeb, and Adam is definitely team SEO. Not to knock PPC. It's all valuable. And every bit of it's valuable. That's why we have it in this company. If it wasn't valuable, I wouldn't be here in this company. That is for sure. Let's see. We've done that. We've done that. Hey, if you would like a t-shirt. We have t-shirts here, and we have some really cool ones. What's your favorite t-shirt? Mine is the one that I kind of came up with. I kind of ripped off the idea. But anyways, it's the one that says SEO and PPC and internet marketing and remarketing. So like text. Okay. Yeah. The text all the way down. Yeah. That's the one that's my favorite. But I also like this. I don't know if you guys can see. Right now, he's got the logo. Blaze and the

logo. You can get t-shirts. We've got all sorts of t-shirts, internet marketing shirts. All you've got to do is go to eWebResults.com slash swag. Also, I was thinking this the other day, just to get the users and community involved. If you have ideas for a t-shirt, shoot. Send them. Send them. Yeah. Send us a picture. Maybe send. Because that's how we make them. We're like, we'll be driving down the road and see some billboard. And we're like, that would be cool as an internet marketing t-shirt. Let's go ahead and get it over. Maybe you'll see your t-shirt design up. Yeah. Yeah. And you can buy it directly from our website. Again, that's eWebResults.com slash swag. If you would like a free website analysis, you can get that free website analysis by going to our website and not surprisingly filling out the free website analysis form. That's really how that works. You get a lot of value out of that website. And I sit out here every day and listen to Alyssa do a lot of the recordings. Because the cool thing is, is if you don't have time, you know, we figured out a way to get you this website analysis. And so we're making these videos and sending them out. And man, these videos are so detailed and so good that, I mean, Alyssa's just knocking out of the park. I see every day she's probably doing 10 or 15 website analysis. So really, we like to say, or I like to say, and then now I'm saying it, so maybe the team will start saying, that the podcast is kind of the heartbeat of the company, right? It kind of expresses the personality and the desire to give away value. So anytime somebody's interacting with us, the team is committed to giving away value, right? How do we give value? So that free website analysis, it's not just like, hey, great, website analysis, get to our next step. No, no, no. It's let me deliver value. Let you walk away from this experience.

And we've got testimonials just about that first initial call. Walk away from this experience, like being really glad that I went through it and with lots of to-do action items to make improvements in your marketing. So you can get that by going to our website, eWebResults.com and filling out the form. All right. So that is the potatoes, not the podcast. That is the potatoes of the podcast. It's time to jump into the meat. Again, this is from Saeed Balki. Five Ways to Improve Your Website's Bounce Rate and Why You Should, right? So that's a good point of like, why do you even want to bother with your bounce rate? Now, we're one of the weird companies that would actually be okay if you had a 100% bounce rate. Did you know that? No. No? Because if they go to one page and they call and they leave the website, that's technically a bounce. True, true. And they call. Okay, yeah, true. So that's actually closer in line to our goal is like, get them to the one page that they need, have enough information on that one page that they can fill out a form. By the way, if they fill out a form, they get a thank you page, so it's not technically a bounce. Or they pick up the phone and call, even better for most of our clients. So 100% bounce rate may not be that bad. It depends on what kind of conversions you're having. And we're all about conversions. That's why we're eWebResults. So why you typically want to make changes so that your bounce rate is decreased, or at least your time on site is increased, right? Because they are different. You can spend a lot of time on one page and then leave, and it's still a bounce. Like a bounce is just visiting one page. It's not visiting multiple pages. So five ways to improve your website's bounce rate. Create content consistently, right? You got any bullet points on create content? I do, because I've got one.

I do, too. All right. So go. You go first. Okay, so when we talk about creating content consistently, it doesn't mean write words on a page and stick them up there. The content needs to be rich, high-value content. There needs to be a reason why someone is going to be on that page and say, you need to answer that question. Go through Google. I'm looking at the computer screen because I'm so used to putting stuff up here. But it's, you know, like, do a search, ask Google a question, and then you get that block of questions. Go through those questions. And answer those questions. And answer those questions. Those are what people are looking for. You can also scroll all the way down to the bottom and look and see what other people are searching for. Those are simple tips and tricks to kind of grab, you know, what people are searching for. To get like a guideline of what kind of content that you might want to be creating. By the way, I feel like Mickey Mouse up here because your voice is so very deep. And I feel like Mickey Mouse talking up like this. You know, according to HubSpot, companies that publish 16 plus blogs per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that publish zero to four monthly posts. Right? Now, that's a pretty big jump from zero to 16, from four to 16. And for someone that sees, you know, most of our clients are two to four blogs a month, there's still a lot of traction. With 16, I think if you're like national, maybe. And super competitive industry. Super competitive, like your McDonald's or something, I guess you could say. Yeah. Like those are the times that you've got to. Yeah. But really, I mean, yeah, that's just a big jump. Yeah, yeah. From four, that's like four is a good amount of articles. So one of the things that we decided very early on when we're doing SEO for our clients is we can't rely

on our clients to create the content, right? Because some clients, most clients will never make the content. Some clients, we have a hard time just getting on the phone, right? I think, what is it, Aaron says, if your strategy relies on the content or the client, it's a bad strategy. So this may sound bad, but work with it. So if the client relies on the customer, then it's, no, I'm sorry. If the concept. If the account, if you're relying on your client as an account manager to get you a lot of this stuff, it's kind of a bad strategy. Yeah. Because a lot of times. It's a strategy. Yeah. Strategy. Because a lot of times the clients, I mean, we get it. You guys have a job. Yeah. That's why you hired us is to do the marketing. So we've got a team in place to like make the videos for you, write the content for you. So that's, you know, create content consistently. Was there anything else you wanted to add onto that content? No, no. That's, that's, that's it on that one. Number two, right? So five ways to improve your website's bounce rate. Number two, add images and video, right? Well, we know how excited Matt gets about talking about video SEO and where it's going. What was it? 20, 20, like 90% of traffic will be video. I don't know. How many videos do you watch on? Well, I, I do a lot of searches now through YouTube actually, like, because I'm like, I'd rather just watch the video and find out what I need to find out than go read in a bunch of blogs. Yeah. And so that's, yeah. Yeah. Can we make sure you're in your shot? Oh, I'm sorry. For those YouTube people out there, I'm making sure Adam is in the shot so you can see all of Adam. Yeah. What is it? And so we can make a recommendation about what kind of, what size of videos. It's also images. So really we talk regularly

about having multi different media, right? So have images, have video, have audio, right? So have audio. So we have, we've got clients where we ended up putting up audio reviews. If they were able to record a call where somebody was leaving them a review, then yeah, let's get that content up on, up, up on the site. It's an original. Yeah. Like you want original. So, so, and just to kind of speak on that, um, had a guy, a client who I did about 50 videos for, and they were all testimonials. So 25 of them were just text, right? They're about 20 seconds long. And then the other 20, uh, 25 were before and after shots of like what he was doing. Right. And putting those on YouTube, pointing the links to their website, it works. Yeah. It gives, because Google sees it as all this fresh content that's new, it's original. And so that's, you know, and it's keeping people on a site because they're watching a video for a minute and a half, two minutes. So that's another thing that helps with the bounce rate. Yeah. And that's, that's good, right? For RankBrain where people have actually come to your webpage, they stay there longer. And because they've stayed there longer, Google was like, oh, they must've gotten sad. They were satisfied by the content that was on that page. So let me bump that page up in the search engine results. So yeah, a lot of value there. Uh, so make sure you add images and video. Number three, speed up your website. Now I know one of like step one, uh, as we get on board a new client, Adam, check the speed and, or Adam, uh, as I was going through the sales process with this client, their website is incredibly slow. So speak a little bit about kind of speed and what, what you guys do. You keep saying Adam, but we all know what you really need to say is Ethan. Yeah. Punch in the face to Ethan. Yeah.

So our technical guy, Ethan, I mean, he's, he's really breaking down the speed of the website, you know, using a lot of the tools. And this article talks about, you know, like pulling up GT metrics, putting your website in there and seeing, you know, what comes back. It's going to give you like an A or a B or a C. A waterfall, right? Yeah. Oh, a grade. Yeah. The grade through. And so you can see like what you're doing. And it could be something as simple as you didn't optimize your images. So they're large images. You can take that, throw it into tiny PNG. I think it's just do a Google search, tiny PNG. Yeah. I drop them in there twice. So I double shrink them and put them up. It doesn't like make the pictures grainy or anything like that, but it shrinks it for the site. And you want to do that with videos, pictures like that's up in speed. You also want to make sure of the cache plug. Okay. So plugins are good and bad. Yeah. You don't want too many plugins. For sure. So that can be a problem. But you like having a plugin that clears the cache. Right. You know, rather than doing it manually. WP Smush is another one. So just what that is. So if you, and we use a lot of, that's good. We use a lot of WordPress. I mean, like the sites that we build are in WordPress. Most of the clients who come to us have WordPress. It represents, I don't know, some, I think it's 70% of the websites that are out there are on WordPress. It's some very large number. And so you've got these plugins that go in there. What cache is, is WordPress like has a footer over here, has a header over there, has images over there. Maybe if it's an e-commerce, has products over there, has the pricing in the database. So when a page is requested, WordPress has to put all of these pieces together.

What cache does is says, hey, for this URL, I put all these pieces together. And unless you exclude it, I'm going to make a hard copy, a hard HTML copy of that page. So the next person who requests that page, I just, I don't have to put the pieces together. They're already put together and I just send it. Right. That's what cache does. And that's why you've got to clear your cache sometimes. And you can get some latent issues when you update a page and the cache isn't cleared. Like when a client calls and says, I thought you changed on your website. And you're like, I did. I did. And then it turns out it was a cache. Yeah. You've got to make sure you clear the cache. So that's what cache is. Certainly speeds up the site. I don't know if you had any more. Well, and I just, I wanted to hit, and this is a little bit off subject, but we talked about WordPress and you kind of went into that. Something that I think that people don't understand a lot is why, like why I, well, we as a team prefer a WordPress site over everyone else is because of the SEO. Right. Like WordPress, you have a hundred percent, like someone that has like a Squarespace side or whatever, it's like a 60, 65%. In terms of how much you can manipulate. How much you can really manipulate to get the SEO value. Right. And so I just kind of wanted to add that on there. You know, if you are looking to build a website or you're looking at wanting to build a new website and you're on an old platform, really look into WordPress because it's, it's just a better platform in my opinion, especially for SEO. So, um, you know, I've seen, I've come, I've almost competed with sites before and the WordPress is going to win every time. Yep. So, uh, we're in, we're in the process for one of our clients. So we get clients

who are on other platforms. Um, Drupal is one of the platforms. Uh, I'm trying to think of, uh, one of the, one of the others. Anyway. So, so there are other big, yeah, ModX is another platform. Right. And so, yeah, we can work in those and we can continue to do some SEO in those and we're in the process of rebuilding those websites because there's so much value in doing them from an SEO perspective and WordPress. So, and don't think you can't scale a Squarespace or a ModX website though. You can get those sites to rank really well. It's just my opinion. And I think even within a lot of the community, just a WordPress, um, is a lot easier. It's a lot easier. Save your time, some effort, save yourself, some effort. All right. So, so speed up the site. One thing, just remember 53% of mobile, uh, site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds. Remember how much searching is happening on mobile devices. And it's just, it's just, we've all been there. Like it's painful. You click a, you click a search result and you're like, all right, load pay. I'm out. Okay. Yeah. It is three, four seconds. I'm out. Yep. Get a faster website. So that's why you want to do it. And there's a lot of good tools listed here. Um, so yes, I just done a good job. Number four, AB test. So what is an AB test? Split testing. It's a split testing, right? Right. Throw that, I'll throw that back at you. Right. So that's where you've got two versions of a page or, uh, and usually it is a page, right? And you've, and you've changed something on one page versus the other page and you're testing it to see which one gets better results. When should you be AB testing? Always. Always. Yes. That is, that is correct. Always. Like just always be AB testing. Like even, even when you think you've reached the pinnacle of your, uh, of your conversion

rate, right? Cause that's really what you're after a better conversion rate. Even when you think that you've reached the pinnacle, keep tweaking it, keep changing it, change the button color, uh, change, uh, the title, change how long the text is, like just keep changing it. Like, and, and you may only run, so A being your most productive, right? Your best conversion rate, you may only want, run 10% of traffic to the other one, but keep changing it. Cause you might hit on something that really takes it to the next level. Right. And that's, that's, you always want to be doing AB testing. I don't know. I, I, I say, uh, yeah, when we say AB test everything, we mean everything title, button color, button size, where the CTAs are placed. Yeah. Yeah. All of that. And you know what the CTAs are. Uh, so make sure you do that. All right. This is number five of five ways to improve your website's bounce rate. Um, uh, target abandoning visitors, right? So, well, there, well, there's two pieces to this, right? Cause this is abandoning visitors. They have not yet abandoned. And I think it's a good idea because, uh, remarketing doesn't actually help the bounce rate, but it does help conversions. And it's so important. We got, we will mention it. Um, but those letters, did you know, and this is the stat from this particular idol girl that Saeed came up with, did you know that over 70% of people who leave your website will never return? And we have another step that we use regularly, which is 95% of people will visit your website and not take an action. Yeah. Right. So they're slightly different, but it's huge. How many people won't take an action, won't come back. And so what you should do there, he's talking specifically about there's, um, exit intent pop-ups. This has all happened to everybody. And yeah. And you know, I was reading this to me and maybe it's just me and I think it's, you know, it

could be anybody that could be kind of spammy, but in the same way, it does kind of grab your attention one more time before you're about to leave. So, and we're kind of used to it, right? Like, okay, exit intent. Exactly. I think like as time's gone on, I'm used to a pop-up. Like when I get to a website now, it's like a pop-up comes up. I keep moving. I just, it's really like this, like the infomercial guy going, but wait, there's one more thing before you leave. What's the one? There's a, there's a site that we have, that I go to all the time in the little chat. It's like, are you still there? It's like, and it's like, I kind of like that. I can't remember the site, whose it is, but there's a site that says that, like, are you still there? I think it's first capital. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Are you still there? All right. So exit intent. So that's as they're moving the mouse. So you've got JavaScript that's on the page that's tracking where the mouse is. And as the mouse is kind of moving towards the back button or moving towards the close the browser button or change the tab button or whatever, really moving towards the top of the page, you kind of do this last pop-up and say, hey, before you leave, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter or whatever. And actually they say that not only can exit intent pop-ups improve your bounce rate, but they can also boost your sales instantly. So it's probably worth doing that. All right. So Saeed, he's an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. So punch in the face to you, Saeed. That was a good, really good article. All right. So if you like this podcast, we're going to ask you to do, I don't know, three things. Go ahead and tell three people about the podcast. And if you have a Twitter account, we're going to ask you to tweet hashtag

SEO podcast. This is podcast number 452. Tag us at best SEO podcast at eWebResults. That's not here. So it's going to be at eWeb Chris Burrus, I think. At Adam Gregory 821. 821? Is it? Yeah, I think it's 821. But I haven't been on my Twitter in a long time. Oh, wow. Yeah. Me either. Yeah. So make sure you tag us in it. If you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, do you know what that is? Us? It's the internet. And we're the kings of the internet. So you're close. It's the internet. Go ahead and call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. 713-592-6724. We are moving to new offices. So you guys are going to see videos. And there's going to be a new location in the podcast. Maybe on the next podcast, but probably not. But the podcast after that will probably have a new location. So we are really excited about that. Just a phenomenal facility that we're moving into. If you have a referral, we have a referral program. Actually, I just cut referral checks today. It's kind of fun to cut referral checks. Thank you for sending those clients to us. We did work for them. They paid us. We pay you. So really good program. That's it. So we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. And Adam has a tip. An SEO tip. So I have a really good SEO tip. It's a basic SEO tip. But you know what? Nobody's doing it. Yeah. It's filling out those categories and tags. On WordPress. On WordPress. Yeah. On your post. And making sure that their categories are matching your services and the description, SEO, meta description, the full, just everything. Categories and tags. Start there. Yeah. I promise you. You'll see results. You'll see results. Yeah. That's a pro tip. Yeah. We might be editing that out. That's what kind of tip that is. No, that's really good. That's what we're about is giving

back to the community. So take that and run with it. We were filmed live here in Houston. If you would like a transcript, video, or audio of this podcast, you can get that at our website, eWebResults.com. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. So thank you. Thank all y'all. You guys are awesome. You've got YouTube subscribers. Everybody. So go ahead and leave us a review. Go to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash eWebResults. That'll get you to our Facebook page. Go ahead and leave a review there, please. And also you can get to our G Plus account, our Google My Business account, just by, and it's super simple. You go to eWebResults.com slash G Plus, and that'll actually take you to the search, SERP, the search engine result page of us. And then actually what will pop up right there in front of you, super easy, is how to leave the review. Click that five stars. And then fill that in, and we'll probably be reading yours on air. So thank you. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. I'm Adam Gregory. Bye-bye for now.