Dear Business Owner, I Have a Couple of Questions For You:

1. Is your website producing the leads you want and think you deserve?
2. Is your website a fine tuned lead machine keeping you so busy that you can not keep up with demand?

If so, read no further, you have cracked the code of the internets. If not, please keep on reading.

Before I started working here at SEO.com, I owned a web development company for many years. We were on the front lines of the conversion optimization revolution. Before companies even heard of it, trusted that they needed it. But there were the few who “got it” and killed their competition by learning how to convert website visitors into better leads as well as obtaining more customers.

When it comes to producing revenue from your website, there are two sides of the coin.

• One side is the issue of traffic or “how many people can I get to visit my website?”  This could be through SEO, Pay Per Click, Social Media and (cough) traditional advertising.
• On the flip side is the issue of conversion or “how can I get these people to do what I want them to do once they get to my site?”

But are you actually asking yourself that question on the flip side, or are you building what I call a “spray and pray” site? Are you just posting as much content as possible, and praying the visitor takes any action?

Or have you planned the path you want them to take, the download, the registration, the sign-up, the purchase you want them to make. Do you have the roadmap to make it easier for your visitors to do so?

Studies have shown that average lead generation websites convert 4-8% of visitors into leads. Not very impressive, right? Well lucky for you, here are five tips for converting your website visitors into more leads and customers:

#1 Identify & Prioritize Site Goals

Increasing your conversion rate doesn’t happen by accident. You have to plan and design for it. Most “corporate” websites were never meant to be lead generation engines. It’s too bad, really, because a good conversion site can accomplish the typical goals of a corporate site just as well, and increase revenue to boot. As I talked to clients, most of them told me that they want their website to “project the right image,” “provide a face to the public,” “inform and educate visitors,” “support existing customers,” yadda, yaddaet, yadda. It’s as if it never occurred to them that you don’t have to actually sell anything on your site in order for it to produce revenue. Isn’t your website a corporate resource just like any other that should provide return on investment (ROI)?

Most CEO’s wouldn’t continue to spend money on a resource that wasn’t providing ROI. But because companies often believe ROI in online marketing can be difficult to measure, companies often lower their expectations. Instead of real ROI, they measure things like impressions, views, or hits and hope for the best. (Incidentally, if you think of your website as an IT resource and not a marketing resource you’re even further behind.)  Instead of setting arbitrary goals, focus on things like these:

• Cost per lead acquisition
• Increase in revenue
• Decrease in cost
• Improved ROI

The Internet is the most measurable marketing medium in the world, if you know what you are doing.

#2 Understand Your Target Audience and Unique Value Proposition

Once you’ve established that conversion and lead generation are “what” your website should accomplish, the next question to ask is “who” are you trying to convert? Here is a list of questions to ask yourself to help you understand your target audience:

• What unique value do you offer?
• What are your visitors looking for?
• How knowledgeable are they about your products or services?
• What additional questions might they have?

Understanding your target audience is vital to formulating the right messaging, designing the right look and feel, and creating compelling calls-to-action. Your unique value proposition forms the core of your marketing message. It is the reason “why” people do business with you. Too often businesses explain themselves in terms of how they see their own business. Sometimes these explanations take the form of mission statements or business plan summaries and are often filled with “insider” language that only they understand. Your unique value proposition should be formulated by looking at your business from your target audience’s perspective. It should be developed with the intent to persuade, not just inform or educate. A visitor should arrive at your site and say “Ah hah, I am in the right place” almost immediately!

#3 Structure Your Site Like a Sales Presentation, Not Like a Brochure

Many companies think of their website as an electronic brochure or catalog – i.e., all of the information about their company is there, the visitor just has to browse around and find it. (Remember Spray and Pray?) To facilitate this, companies pay attention to usability guidelines and include the ability to search the site. If the goal of the site is to inform or educate, this type of structure is probably sufficient. However, if the goal is to persuade someone to take action, the typical structure is sorely lacking.

If you structure your site like a brochure, you are relying on the visitor to go where they think they want to go within your site. Inevitably, they are going to get elements of your sales presentation out of sequence and it is going to be less persuasive. Or worse, perhaps they will stumble across information that was intended for a completely different audience and therefore it confuses them and they bounce.

Rather than thinking of your site as a brochure, think of it as a sales presentation. Most sales relationships begin with some rapport building and needs analysis. Once a sales person has the confidence of the prospect and understands their needs, they can begin to present their solution to those needs. The presentation is usually something that the sales person has practiced and knows well. They knows that it seems to make more sense to people when they say; A, then B, then C. It has a logical flow and includes some stories of satisfied customers or other emotional elements as well. At the appropriate point in the presentation, the sales person knows when and how to ask for the sale, or ask them to take the next step. In your fine tuned website it could be something like downloading an eBook, attending a webinar, etc.

If you understand your target audience and what they are looking for, and have crafted a persuasive value proposition for them, you can structure your site like a sales presentation that guides them through a pre-defined series of pages that you know from experience has the best chance of persuading them to take action.

#4 Graphic Design Is a Support, Not a Strategy

A radio ad for a local web design firm talks about creating the right look and feel to help their clients project the right image. They claim “image is everything.” While look and feel, image, and graphic design in general are certainly important, they are by no means “everything.” In fact, good graphic design should accomplish three specific goals on your website:

1. Create instant affinity
2. Build credibility
3. Focus the visitor on the message.

If you are expecting more than that from your graphic design, you are asking too much.

Studies over the years have found that people make a general good/bad judgment of websites in the first 1/20th of a second. The other interesting thing that this study found is that those initial judgments usually last. That’s right, they wont be coming back. You really do have only one chance to make a first impression, and create a feeling of trust, rapport, and affinity.

Graphic design that is too busy, bright, and gaudy, or bare, bland and text driven can distract your visitor. Graphic design should be clean and not cluttered. Do some research about what colors and images:

• Appeal to your target audience
• Convey a feeling of professionalism, credibility and trustworthiness

You should summarize your unique value proposition into a prominently displayed positioning statement, and make sure you have a plainly visible call-to-action that directs the visitor where (they think/you want them) to click next.

#5 Utilize Effective Lead Capture Mechanisms

Finally, by strategically placing a proper calls-to-action on each page, you now can direct visitors through your site in a persuasive sequence. We called these calls-to-action “sign-posts.” Two things to keep in mind when creating sign posts are:

1. Offer something of high-perceived value to your target audience (yet low cost to deliver for you).
2. Offer something that helps qualify visitors as prospects. (For example, offering a drawing for a free big screen TV does not tell you whether the person entering the drawing is interested in your products or services, only that they are interested in a free TV)

Before the visitor can access your free offer, you should capture their contact information. The fields you include on your form should only include information you will actually use. In other words, don’t ask for their mailing address if you aren’t going to mail them anything. You can also use the form, however, to gain additional intelligence about the person including how they heard about you. This kind of information can be very valuable in measuring the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns (going back to tip #1). Also, ask questions that can better help you grade your leads. Stop wasting time calling everyone, call quality scored leads that ROCK!

While this post is not going to give you all the detailed knowledge and implementation processes, let it serve as an inspiration to get you and your business thinking about techniques you can use to turn your website into a lead generation machine.

A couple items to research, and truly understand is

• Analytics: Learn to set up your goals, track your traffic, your funnels, and make sure they are doing what you intended
• Split Testing: There are free services available for you to do this, as well as paid. But if you are not consistently testing and tweaking your site, you are losing precious leads
• Check your ego at the door: I know you may be tempted to make this a shrine of information and show how badass your company is. But at the end of the day less is more, and your site should be built for leads. When wondering if you should add a particular piece of content, ask yourself this: By adding this, is it 100% in-line with my site goals? If not, scrap it!

In future posts, we can diver deeper into specific ideas to help you with your site. If you have questions, or comments, please leave them below. That might help me decide where to take this topic next.

Until next time…

Doc

5 Tips To Convert Website Visitors 
Into More Leads
 & Sales is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

In the world of search engine optimization, competitive intelligence is an indelible source of campaign sustenance. Knowing where competitors are ranking for key terms, and more importantly, why they might have better rankings than your site, is information you simply cannot go without. I am going to walk through a few different ideas that will help effectively analyze search competitors.

Of the many competitive research tools available, Open Site Explorer shines brightly above the alternatives. It’s very intuitive – first time users will find it incredibly easy to use. You simply enter your URL, along with up to 4 competitors, and you get lots of data to start analyzing.

Total External Links

External links are useful see how you compare to competitors in online conversation and presence, and will help you set goals in your SEO strategy.

Link building can be a numbers game, and this report will help you determine whether it’s quantity, or quality (meaning high value) links that you lack compared to other sites in your industry.

Total Linking Root Domains

The Total Linking Domains report gives you a look at the diversity of domains sending links to your competitor’s websites. If you see that they have a high number of links, but a low number of total linking root domains, you know that they are getting most of their links from the same domains. It is better to have both a high number of links as well as a high number of linking root domains.

Linking C Blocks

The Linking C Blocks (or C class IPs) report refers to the IP addresses of linking websites.

While very similar to the Linking Root Domains report, this isn’t the same thing. C Blocks are your way of identifying the true backlink diversity of any given website. Getting 500 links from 500 unique C Block IP addresses is more impressive to search engines than 500 links from 500 different domains that are hosted on the same IP (or even C Block IP), which may look suspiciously like a linking network.

It is always best to have both a high number of linking root domains and a high number of linking C blocks in your link portfolio.

Evaluating the ratio between C blocks and linking root domains is also a quick way to identify whether a particular competitor is using a network of links.

Back Link Portfolio

After we have looked through these stats and set some goals on what you want to accomplish in your strategy we can next pull the backlink portfolio and see exactly where the competitors are getting their links. It is always best to sort their link portfolio by highest to lowest by page authority. This way you can start with their highest authoritative links and analyze and see how they got their link on that site and figure out a way to get a link on that site as well, weather it is a directory that you can place a link or a blog that you can offer a guest post to. It helps to think outside the box and figure out a way to get a link on their site.

Hopefully these tips will help you the next time you analyze your competitors and you will be able to find some high quality links for your site.

4 Competitive Reports Your SEO Will Die Without is a post by SEO expert Trenton Hymas. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Chances are you may have heard of the Butt-Brush Effect, from Paco Underhill’s seminal work, “Why We Buy.”

A brief synopsis of the Butt-Brush Effect: Underhill observed women shopping for neckties at a department store (not in a creepy way, he was conducting research). He noticed that the racks were really close to the entrance and at peak times, women looking at ties might get brushed from behind by a passer-by. When that happened to one of the women, she would almost immediately stop shopping in that section and either go to another or just leave the store.

This is a phenomenon that occurs frequently in stores, but what about online? Is your website guilty of creating “butt-brush” moments of anxiety for your customers? Does your website violate your customers’s sense of security, comfort and control? Here are five common examples of online butt-brush moments that you should immediately purge from your website:

Pop-ups

I’m not talking about the standard spammy pop-up ads. Obviously those are bad. They’re so flagrantly bad that there’s no point in discussing them. I’m talking about the well-intentioned pop-ups like customer service chat windows or moving-target survey solicitations; obstacles that interrupt the persuasive momentum of focused shoppers.

Be extremely careful in how you use chat windows. While they can be helpful for visitors that are genuinely lost or confused, don’t interrupt a focused customer on a path to their destination. Be selective about the pages that can trigger a pop-up. Check your analytics data for high exit rates and restrict the use of interruptions to pages that are already failing.

A similar problem exists for survey solicitations. There are ways to invite visitors to take a survey without taking the entire screen hostage. A tool like KissInsights allows you to ask survey questions with a noticeable but modestly placed question box. With this type of approach, you don’t risk frustrating your website visitors to gather a little intelligence. You still want the sale, after all, right?

Hey, get out of my way. I'm trying to give you money!

Auto-play music and video

Sometimes this works for shaping the conversation and producing the outcome you want from your website visitors. For a LOT of people, it’s on par with dumping a bucket of cold water on them or – wait for it – unexpectedly smacking them on the butt.

We’ve all seen it: your default action when a video starts playing without your permission is not to watch, but to turn it off and reestablish control of your experience with the website. Make your video conspicuous enough that people will choose to start it on their own. Assuming control over your visitors in this way is bad manners.

Mind your manners. Let your visitors choose whether or not they’ll watch the video.

Kanye thinks your video is one of the best ever, too, but don't interrupt your visitors to show it.

Dramatic changes in design between pages of your site

This often occurs when shoppers go from a custom landing page to the main website, or if your website uses a third-party shopping cart with low customization capabilities.

Consistency in design is a strong comfort signal to shoppers as they progress from one page to the next. Abrupt changes to the site layout, color scheme, images, font styles/sizes, etc., can spook customers and cause them to abandon the buying process. Make sure that you maintain visual consistency from start to finish in order to keep customer anxiety as low as possible.

Concealing shipping costs until late in the checkout process

Shoppers  aren’t stupid. If your shipping prices are really high, shoppers are going to abandon the buying process regardless of whether you show them shipping price in the shopping cart or on the last page of the checkout process.

When you withhold this information on the shopping cart page, shoppers aren’t thinking, “Oh that’s OK, I’ll just keep going and they’ll show it later.” They are thinking, “Yup, the shipping is a rip-off. If it wasn’t, they’d show it right away.” It’s an instant red flag that will have your customers on high alert for the remainder of their experience with your company.

As online shoppers get more savvy, your only hope is transparency.

What other “butt-brush” moments have you noticed in your own personal experience? Please share in the comments and help us all improve the experience we provide to our customers.

Your Website and the Butt-Brush Effect is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Today, there are really two purposes of website content:

*To communicate with search engines

*To communicate with website visitors

The problem is, search engines and site visitors speak different languages.

And that right there is the paradox. If you write it solely for the search engines, you may get better rankings but visitors will bounce off your site before they can read your second stuffed keyword. If you write just for visitors, it’s likely nobody will find your site to read your beautiful verbiage anyway.

It’s a delicate balance communicating with search engines and people at the same time, or in other words, mix good, persuasive writing with the right SEO keywords. Talented writers can do it seamlessly, however, without sounding like they speak a foreign language. Here are 7 steps to writing good SEO copy that doesn’t suck:

1. Solve Your Audience’s Problem

Whether it’s creative, engaging or whatever, everything written on a website should essentially be a solution to the visitor’s problem. First you must know your prime audience and what problem they want solved, then show how you will solve that problem.

2. Write as if SEO Does Not Exist

Get the message across first. Communicate to humans first. Write it powerfully and simply without the shackles of keywords. This will make a more compelling message that punches the visitor in the face. Afterwards, it’s easy to insert the right keywords and links.

3. Consult SEO Specialist, Do What He/She Says (Mostly)

Keep that guy or girl in the loop. The SEO dude (or dudette) has done the research, knows what keywords will drive the right traffic, what keywords should be linked to what page, etc. You can be creative to fit in most of those suggested keywords. After you write it, make sure the SEO specialist approves.

4. Sacrifice Keywords for the Good of Art

Most SEO now depends on getting the right links. If keywords are making it TOO clunky and awkward, you may be forced to get rid of them. Otherwise the visitor will think you are a robot from the Philippines. If the SEO guy has problems, tell him to build more links.

5. Sacrifice Art for the Good of Keywords

Sometimes there are keywords that must be in the copy or h1 tags. Those big, money making keywords take precedence. This is the delicate balance where a writer and the SEO specialist have to come to terms.

6. Use Right Format, i.e. “h1”

Your main headline should be written using the h1 tag and should include the main keywords you would like your particular page to rank for. If you’re really serious about SEO-ing your page, the keywords in the h1 should essentially match the keywords in the title tag for the page (If you’re curious about what a title tag is go here). Also, here’s a post about other basic on-page optimization tips, which include stuff about h1′s and h2′s.

7. Beware of Spammy, Blackhat

Keyword stuffing, duplicate content, cloaked content – all that stuff is bad news. Despite having the search engines put you in the doghouse for it, users hate it too. That stuff is bad for your image from a marketing and PR standpoint, and I don’t even need to talk about how that stuff negatively affects website conversion.

Do you agree with these steps? Have any other advice for writing SEO website copy? Please comment.

7 Steps to Writing Good SEO Website Copy that Humans Will Read is a post by SEO expert Dan Bischoff. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is part three in a series of four posts on understanding the realities and challenges of split testing to improve your website’s conversion rate. If you missed earlier parts in the series, you can read them here:

• Part 1: Traffic considerations
• Part 2: Choosing meaningful tests
• Part 3: Executing your test

Can you measure the results of your test? Does your test’s performance metric(s) matter?

In addition to limitations in creating and displaying test variations, you also need to make sure you can identify meaningful metrics and measure them accurately.

Generally speaking, the further your test is from the point of transaction, the more difficult it is to identify and isolate meaningful, reliable performance metrics. Offer pages, product pages and shopping carts are the most commonly tested because it’s easier to measure the results and the results usually relate directly to revenue or leads without subsequent influence from external factors.

Once you move out to the homepage, category pages (eCommerce) or information pages, your most reliable metrics become intermediate metrics, usually click-through rate to a desired page or pages. You should still measure sales or leads, but I’m not out to confuse anybody, so I’ll forgo the explanation of this until another time. Suffice it to say things get more complicated, so lean mostly on your most immediate metric for tests like this.

Despite these challenges, you shouldn’t be discouraged from venturing into split testing. In fact, now that you understand the challenges, your chances of success go way up. Go forth and realize the full potential of your website.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 4 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Eliminate everything on your website that doesn’t contribute to the primary objective.

Every website has one major objective. It could be a purchase, download, contact form submission, or any number of actions. It also has several other less important but necessary objectives; actions that only indirectly result in a sale. A successful website is one where every secondary objective is held accountable to the more important primary goal.

Water Fountains

Let’s say we have a website that sells water fountains. The first thing we would do is set up a goal in Google Analytics that tracks fountain sales. That’s our primary objective. But we also have a page on our site that offers advice on interior decorating with water features. We have another page on the art of water placement in Feng Shui. Finally, we have a page where people can sign up for our monthly newsletter. We have created these pages so people can learn more before they buy a fountain.

But just because the page is there doesn’t mean it’s doing its job.

What we need to do is set up additional goals in analytics that track what happens on these pages. Ideally, people will purchase fountains more often after browsing our informational resources. If lots of people are heading to the purchasing areas after reading, we may be doing a good job. We’d also like to see purchases increase as newsletter subscriptions increase. If that happens, our newsletter might be OK. In our analytics software, we want to see exactly where people go after they hit a given page. That data can be used to determine if our information and newsletter are doing a good job of enticing people to buy.

The important thing here is that secondary objectives can provide small wins on the way to the big win. They can also show losses and force us to change things around. We want to know how every part of our site is behaving so we can keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad. We’ll need to set up tests to determine winners. We want to embark on a journey where our site keeps getting better and better at driving people down the conversion funnel to the purchase.

Recap

To recap, tracking only one major goal (such as purchases) leaves us blind to everything else happening on our site. We have to be aware of how everything is performing so that we make our website an efficient sales or lead producing machine. The way to do that is by setting up goals in our analytics software and tracking how efficiently our pages are guiding people to the primary objective.

Engagement can be a fuzzy term in search marketing, but it’s exactly what we want. A user who converts in our secondary areas is engaged, and engaged users are more likely to buy.

Simplify. Track Goals. Sell More Stuff. is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I get energized when clients and my SEO colleagues catch the vision of split testing changes to a website. The potential for conversion rate increases is huge, and it’s also great fun!

It’s not all rainbows and fluffy bunnies, however. There are challenges that can sabotage otherwise promising split testing efforts. Awareness of these challenges will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls.

Here’s Part 1 in a four-part series:

Your website needs robust traffic to support a reasonable testing cycle.

If your website is brand new, it’s likely that you don’t have enough traffic to make split testing worthwhile. The more time it takes to complete a split test, the less valid your test result is likely to be because external factors can influence results.

These external factors are things like shifts in market demand (seasonality is a common example of this) and external media factors.

Want to know how long your test might take to reach a valid conclusion? Here’s how to figure it out:

1. Figure out how many test combinations you want to run. If you want to test one variation, that’s two combinations because you always test against the current version.
2. Calculate how much traffic per day passes through the test page. More traffic means the test will take less time, everything else being equal.
3. What percentage of traffic do want to include in the test? Exposing only a fraction of your traffic to the test will reduce the risk of your test negatively impacting revenue, but also increases the amount of time needed for your test.
4. What is the current conversion rate of this page? Whatever your success metric is, you need to know the performance benchmark you’re trying to beat.
5. What is your expected rate of improvement? The improvement needs to be high enough to have a measurable impact on your business. If a 10% improvement doesn’t offset the cost of executing the test, you need to aim higher.

Google provides a free test duration calculator that does the complex math for you. Just punch in the numbers to see how many days your test will likely have to run. If you need to decrease the duration, you can choose to run fewer test combinations or increase the percentage of traffic included in the test.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 1 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If Internet buzz is to be believed, lots of marketers are getting excited about this Conversion Optimization stuff.

If you’ve been reading about conversion optimization and are thinking about trying your hand at optimizing your company’s website, let me give you one tip that will save a lot of head-scratching and staring at the floor whilst being grilled by your boss:

Be aware of how your changes may affect the way users perceive and interact with the rest of your site.

In more technical terms, you need to consider how different treatments affect the interactions between your test variable, the rest of that page, and the rest of the website.

Adjust your focus

Many marketers like to think in terms of headlines, images, copy, buttons, layouts. It’s an easy way to approach conversion optimization, but the real power is in the interactions.

Interactions are the relationships between elements on your site that combine to shape customers’ perceptions of your business and products, and influence them to take certain actions consciously or subconsciously.

In order to understand interactions, you have to – brace for the cliché – put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You must be able to experience your own website through the filter of your customers’ experiences and knowledge.

Hypothetical scenario: SuperDuperComputers.com

Here’s what happens when marketers ignore interactions when making website changes:

SuperDuperComputers.com is rolling out a new tablet PC and wants to spread awareness of the product to all online visitors. So they whip up a big banner and stick it on the homepage, front and center. It’s the best product in the universe. The executive team forecasts an increase in online revenue of 50%.

To the dismay of the friendly folks at SDC, site revenue only jumps 5%. Upon closer inspection, the new tablet PC produced the revenue forecasted, so what happened?

The new homepage banner was so flashy and prominent that visitors who would have otherwise clicked through and bought other products were drawn in by the tablet PC banner, decided it wasn’t what they wanted and then abandoned the site.

The marketers involved in this admittedly oversimplified scenario failed to consider the effect that the new banner would have on their other products. The new product would appeal to some potential customers, but certainly not all. Overemphasizing the new product distracted shoppers from finding their ideal solution. Both the customer and company suffered as a result.

The Big Takeaway

How do you avoid making this potentially fatal mistake with your own website?

Look at the big picture. Examine a particular page within the entire context how users discover and interact with it. If changing a particular headline, image or layout a certain way would negatively impact its relevance within the entire funnel, you have three choices:

1. Optimize the entire funnel – ads, inbound link sources (that you control, of course), and subsequent pages.
2. Make less dramatic changes to preserve continuity in the funnel.
3. Find something more flexible to test.

Have any of your tests produced big gains without disrupting vital interactions? Share them here!

Interactions – The Hidden Force of Conversion is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.

Bounce Rate

With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.

New vs. Returning Visitors

A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.

Time on Site

A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.

Pages Per Visit

This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.

Traffic Sources

This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your search engine optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of website traffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.

Content

This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.

The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.

Image courtesy of BigTallGuy

Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You is a post by SEO expert Nathan Blair. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.