The human element
Most of the articles so far have been about how to get Google to find and place your website higher on the search list. This is very important but another factor needs to go into creating a website and that is the human element.
If you use Google Analytics you will see a statistic called bounce rate. This is how many people come to a website and then leave without going beyond the first page. What is the point of getting a high placement of a website on Google if people do not stay and look at the website?
I have seen many companies become obsessive with becoming number one on Google but have a 90+% bounce rate. From my perspective, I would rather have a company be number two on Google but have higher sales.
How do you know what humans are doing with your website? Again using Google Analytics check out section called Content Overview, this section will help you find out what the humans are up to on your website. Let’s take some time and explain some of this sections information.
The statistic of “Pageviews” is how many humans come and visit your site. This number can be deceptive because if a person hits reload they can be counted more than once. While this number should be tracked one should not assume that it completely represents a true number of people coming to the site.
“Unique Views” is all human visitors who are visiting the site for the first time during a fixed time frame. If your report is set for a two week period and the same person comes back in three weeks they will be counted again as a unique visitor. If they come back within those two weeks then they are counted once as unique and the second time they would just be added to the page views.
“Bounce Rate” is what it sounds like. It measures the percent of visitors who come to the webpage and then rather than go to another page of the site just leaves. A high number means that you are attracting a lot of traffic for a very general keyword. But only a small proportion of these visitors will be looking for your particular product or service. This will create a very high bounce rate.
A low bounce rate can be created artificially several ways. For example a site can have a splash page with a link to click on to go to the real home page. By having the visitors go to this second page it creates a lower bounce rate but does not give an accurate view of how may visitors the site really retains.
The final section of “Content Overview” is the “top content” of the site. This portion lists the main pages and the number of visitors each pages has. Google only lists a few of the top pages most web servers can generate statistic for all pages on a website. It doesn’t matter if you use Google or your own statistics, but the list of the most popular pages of your site can help you figure out what people are interested in. It can be used to map what order people are going to on the website.
No single statistic should be taken as the sole criteria for the condition of a website. However, if the site constantly gets high bounce rates and it secondary pages have a very low page count it then clearly the website is not interesting to humans ..
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