Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-10-31 07:09:14 - Graham EllisTwo alternatives:
This example is described in the following article(s): |
Both provide links to the same place - but which would you be more likely to follow from an example program that you've come to via a search engine?
We get plenty of visitors arriving at our web site through search engine hits - thousands every day. But only a small proportion of arrivals go on to view other pages. Should this be something that's a concern to us? How can we improve our retention rate? And what is a good retention rate anyway?
Should it be a concern?
This page ... is a technical article. And if you've landed here through a search, or by following a link on another web site, it's very possible that you've come to exactly the right information. So your arrival is a success, even though you'll be viewed in our statistics as a one hit wonder - a visitor who's come to a page and not gone any further.
Do we have any way of knowing whether you found what you wanted? No - we don't - but we have data that lets us make an educated guess; we keep combined format log files and they tell us what your previous page was ... and if it's a search engine, that includes the search term. Where someone has searched for "Merging two lists in Tcl" and been taken [here], they've probaby find what they're looking for. But if someone has searched for "why use tcl" and was taken [here], they would be disappointed. I'm somewhat relieved that in researching this paragraph, I had to look quite hard for an example of someone being taken to a page that didn't answer the questions - such has been the improvement in search engines in the past few yeats
Our hotel home page ... is much more of a sales tool. And if you land there from a search engine, I really want you to look further - especially to go forward to (and complete!) the booking process. But - ever there - a single hit isn't necessarily bad news; you may have made a note of our name, bookmarked us, forwarded to a friend.
How can we improve our retention rates?
By providing clear links and a clear path to other likely data. It's obvious once this has been stated, but sites sometimes grow and what were once quiet backwaters become important landing pages. We publish the source code examples from our training courses - and at first that was very much as a resource for past delegates so that they could get back to the code that's in our manuals. So these were pages that would only be visited by following links. However, we allowed the search engines to index them (no Disallow in our robots.txt) and they became occasional - then more common - landing pages.
Our initial addition of links to other resources was in the first form show at the top of the page - with a format along the lines of "click here for more information". Thus the ongoing link was provided ... but I've become increasingly concerned that people haven't really know what the more information actually is, so I've now added in the more descriptive link which you'll see in the second form shown at the top of this page.
I'm not going to pretend that the more descriptive links are a total solution - they are certainly not - but they're another step in the (changing) right direction. They could be a lot of work ... except that we script the reverse links through PHP, so I've only got to link to a piece of source code on the blog and a reverse link will appear in the source code page.
What is a good retention rate anyway?
I would be guessing if I tried to come up with a specific figure. The perfect retention rate is one in which everyone who arrives at the site finds what they're looking for / books the hotel rooms they need / books the courses that are relevant to them or finds the onward guidance to let them do so by email or offline
And finally
To help retain YOU!, I should be finishing off this article with my guess (!) at relevant onward links. There will be following articles below (if you're reading the blog original). There will be links to other articles on similar subjects (if you're visiting through the archive).
Or ...
[link] - Well House Manor hotel
[link] - other articles on search engine optimisation
[link] - upcoming public courses
[link] - private courses at our training centre
[link] - private courses at your own office
... and adding more links than that would probably do more harm than good!