5 Reasons visitors leave your website

The following has been compiled with the help of 39 respondents who kindly gave us their time over the phone for a short survey.
Our main research task was to find out what made website visitors leave the website homepage without even clicking on a single link.  There have been extensive research done on this in the past, however, we wanted to delve further with a more up-to-date approach considering recent Internet usage trends, website design ‘best-practices’ and with the current Internet landscape in mind. We have also laid out some recommendations on how you can avoid these pitfalls

Reason 1 – Information overload
With the popularity of Search Engine Optimization, this is becoming more commonplace as website owners try to improve the keyword density of their home (and sub-pages) to rank better. This often leads to trade-offs in whats best for the user vs. search engines.  Key here is to lay out the information in a neat and structured format with relevant information binded together for ease-of-read (think colour-coding or boxed approach).

Reason 2 – Page load time
Your website has approximately 4-6 seconds to convince a new visitor to stay.  You want to make sure that this time is spent looking at the site content, not waiting for it to load. As a general rule of thumb: More content = More code = Longer page load time.
However, ‘content’ refers to text, images as well as rich content such as flash.  Trimming down on unnecessary images , graphics and video can significantly bring down load times.

Reason 3 -  ‘Above the fold’  information
This refers to the part of the website that first shows up without using the vertical scroll to navigate further down the page. This will primarily depend on the monitor size and resolution, therefore, a safe bet would be to assume a 15 or 17 inch. and 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 resolution (most common currently).
Make sure the most important information (relevant to your business) is visible above the fold . Common elements include headline, your Unique Sales Proposition, intro text and contact details.

Reason 4 – Inconsistent design with service offering
Here is an interesting one: 19% of respondents told us that they would not bother going further than the home page if the design was not consistent with their idea of the ideal service provider. This highlights the importance of not just having a design that your target market can relate to, but also one that is consistent with your own business offering.

Reason 5 – Browser incompatibility issues
As browsers such as Firefox and Chrome become more popular, make sure your website displays correctly across the entire range of browsers from old to latest versions of each. Browsershots offers a free and useful feature which allows you to check your website’s appearance across all currently available browsers.

If you have any comments or would like to tell us about what website feature (or lack of) annoys you the most, we’d love to hear about it!

A subtle call-to-action button for your website

Just noticed this on the Photodex website:

On each page, there is a line of text which reads ‘Customer Service Lines are currently OPEN (or CLOSED, depending). 

Not only does this prompt you to contact the company should you have a query, it also helps overseas website users/customers save time and money on a phone call outside company office-hours.

A refreshing change to the usual ‘Call us NOW’ flash text approach.

Australian lawyer serves eviction notice on Facebook

The potential uses of Facebook just keep increasing..

A law firm in Cranberra posted an eviction notice to a couple who failed to keep up repayments on their loan borrowings. After several failed attempts by the lawyers to contact the couple, they decided to place the eviction notice on the couple’s Facebook profile. What’s more, due to the popularity and detailed personal information Facebook provides about its members, this has now been accepted by the Autralian Supreme Court as an acceptable method of communication to post legal notices.

Read the full article here.

Most commonly searched terms in UK (2008)

Google released Google Zeitgeist 2008 which is basically a list compiling the most common as well as the fastest rising search terms on Google.

Fastest rising:

1. iplayer
2. facebook
3. iphone
4. youtube
5. yahoo mail
6. large hadron collider
7. obama
8. friv
9. cam4
10. jogos

Most popular: 

1. facebook
2. bbc
3. youtube
4. ebay
5. games
6. news
7. hotmail
8. bebo
9. yahoo
10. jobs

BBC’s iplayer cetainly seems to have taken off and rightly so: being able to watch your favourite tv shows upto 14 days after being aired is incredibly helpful.

You can find the complete Google Zeitgeist 2008 list here.

Danone Hungary website built using free WYSIWYG editor!

Whilst reviewing some of the free online WYSIWYG website editors available learnt something pretty interesting: Danone’s Hungarian website is built using Saurapool, a free and easy to use online website creator.

Sure, times are tough..but this??

A website usability lesson from Motrin

This post was written with the help of this.

What was meant to strike a chord with moms turns into a total disaster. Message sent= a pain reliever to help ease the discomfort of wearing a baby. Message heard = carry your baby, look cool, take a Motrin to help ease the pain. Youtube and Twitter are all inundated with negative feedback from baby-wearing mums.
Can’t help but wonder that if real moms were consulted in the ad development process, it might have turned out differently.

I think it’s important to bear this in mind when desiging websites- Clearly define the audience and then design it with them in mind. Consult them and ask for their opinions. The product/service you are selling, demographics of the target market, how tech-savvy they are (or aren’t) should all govern the end design for a positive user experience.

Pay Per Click Keyword research ideas

If you have managed Adwords or another PPC campaign before, you will know that the autocomplete feature of the Google search box and the built in keyword suggestion tool within Adwords are some of the ways to come up with a keyword list. Here some more which are more commonly used for Search Engine Optimization, but can help increase the efficiency of your PPC campaign, nonetheless:

Direct customer research – If your a B2C business, then why not ask customers who call you over the phone, how they found your website and what keywords did they use.
Web Analytics – check the ‘keyword’ or ’search term’ feature which will give you the exact keywords people are using to find your website
Online survey- If your customer can purchase directly on your website, offer them a short survey listing questions which can help you determine the visitor path such as ‘How did you find this website (PPC or organic)’, ‘What keywords did you use’ etc

Online scamsters move up a gear

A certain spam email seems to be in circulation, subject: ‘Buy premium internet keywords for £1′. As many of you will know, companies claiming to sell you keywords on Google has been going on for quite some time. However, more often than not, once you visit the link provided by the scam & co, the landing website is so poorly built and ridden with typos that its quite evident something’s not quite right.

The Word Collection takes this to next level. The spam email was quite friendly and well written and the build quality of the website was far better than any fake website I have seen.

Fraudlink: http://www.wordcollection.co.uk.

Does your website have a timeline?

Whether your business has a few hundred employees or it’s just yourself running the show, one of the simplest features you can integrate within your website is a page dedicated to displaying the important milestones your business has achieved form inception to now.
A ‘Milestone/Achievements’ feature shows that you take pride in not just your service/product but your business as a brand as well as offer a new prospect a sense of confidence in dealing with you.

Is Google going to be the end for SEO?

Some of you might have noticed or seen (if you were chosen as part of the bucket test) that Google is testing SearchWiki – a web 2.0 approach to search which allows users to rate search results, add comments to each result as well as view other user comments. Based on your rating of results, you can affect the positioning of SERP which means an organic result position 2 can be changed to 7 or 8 or removed completely.

Best of all, you can even add your own results via the URL and then move it up/down which means a result which would appear on page 4 organically can now be made to appear on page 1.

Although, at the moment, changes you make will only appear on your computer, I can’t help but think the whole point of this excercise from Google’s perspective is something more ‘grand’. Perhaps, applying principles of semantic search to learn from user ratings and creating new algorithms that will govern the future direction of how results and rankings are displayed.

For now it means that if your website is well optimised for Google your position within the SERP will appear as is. Until the user changes it. In the future this might mean that no matter how well your site is optimised, if users don’t like it, you are history. For Google anway.