Beyond SEO: Florist Website Bounce Rates
Search Engine Optimization is just that, optimizing your website for Search Engines. But what about their human counterparts? Sure SEO helps to get potential buyers to your Florist Website, but what happens after they arrive? Your website has a mere 8 seconds to make an impression, and though that may seem like a long time, I encourage you to test its ability to make an impression in those moments. Give someone, who has never before visited your website, 8 seconds, then ask them: What do you remember? What images? What categories? What text did you read?
Is Your Florist Website Sticky?
The visuals and layout of your Florist Website are hugely important to how someone will interact with your website. Does your site look professional, creative, inviting? Or does it look like your nephew designed it, or cookie-cutter or worse, cluttered? If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent countless hours in and around your websites pages. It can be hard to have a clear perspective on what’s working, what looks good, and what’s just plain tacky and driving people away. A good indicator of how well your homepage is received is your Florist Website’s Bounce Rates. This is the percentage of people who upon arrival to your website, immediately leave. Of course there are many factors that can effect your Bounce Rates (such as misleading links to your website or Social Media hot topics) but for the most part this stat can give you perspective on your website’s “stickiness”.
It is important to remember that Bounce Rates can be applied to your entire website, but for the purposes of analyzing the most important and most popular visitors first impression, you should look at the Bounce Rates as they apply to your Index page (ie. homepage).
Get With The Program
How do you get such information you ask? Well there is more than one way but if you don’t use it already, you should definitely sign up for Google Anlaytics. Not only is it free, but it will provide you with far more website statistics than you will likely ever need. If you already have Analytics, great, you can skip ahead. If you’re just getting started, you will need to complete the sign up process, which includes pasting some code into your website. Take a look at the Installation Guide or get in touch with your Webmaster.
Once you have at least a month or so of stats to look at, go into the Content Analysis section and look at the Bounce Rates for only your Index page. If you have decent traffic to base the analysis on and the rates are below 20% you’re in good shape. If it’s closer to 50-60%, you need to take a serious look at your websites content, text, layout and overall design, STAT.
An alternative and immediate option to Google’s statistics is Clicky Web Analytics. This is site is great because it gives you instant access to how people are interacting with your website, right now. You can sign up and get a free trial but be prepared to pay a small but well worth it fee to use all the sites features. On this site too you can access your websites Bounce Rates: In “The Basics” box of your stats you will see the Bounce Rate, even though this represents the entire website, it is still a valuable number to watch. Pay attention to how it relates to your other stats as well, such as Visitors and Average Time Per Visit. Obviously always make sure you are comparing enough data before drawing any major conclusions.
Test, Test and Test Again!
I encourage you to test it out. If you have access to making changes on your homepage, such as headlines, featured arrangements, editing text or category titles etc try changing an item or 2 and watch your Bounce Rate. If it works, change a little more, if after a fair amount of time, your % increases (not good), try something else. I always suggest taking notes when any significant changes to your website are made, this will help you when looking at your stats sometimes weeks and months later.
WARNING! When considering more drastic changes to your websites layout, proceed with caution. A good rule of thumb is don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Check out what other more successful websites are doing, heck, check out the big guys and even those evil Order Gatherers (they are in the business of flowers after all, and not the flower business). Also, it’s a good idea to test during off-season, I would advise not taking any drastic measure in the weeks before Christmas, Valentine’s or Mother’s Day. Major changes in text will directly effect your SEO and rankings, so unless you know it will help in these departments, save it until the summer months.
Any Questions? Ask Away!
