What is bounce rate?

A bounce rate shows the percentage of people who land on a web page and then exit the website without viewing any other page on your site. A 50% bounce rate means that half of your website visitors do not visit any other web page on your site.

How does bounce rate impact your website’s search engine rankings?

There are two ways the bounce rate can negatively affect your website’s rankings in the SERPs.

1. First, a high bounce rate indicates low engagement. Google is now paying a lot of attention to engagement rate, and a low engagement rate (high bounce rate) may lead to a demotion in the search engine rankings.
2. Second, and most importantly, Google tracks people who click on a search result, land on your website and then exit immediately, go back to search results and click on another result and land on one of your competitor’s websites.

This second phenomenon is known as ‘pogo sticking’, and this is becoming a big deal in modern-day SEO. You can say that pogo sticking is a form of bounce rate. There are many reasons why some websites have high bounce rates and high pogo sticking rates. Here are a few of them and how you can improve these metrics.

1. Slow loading website

If a website loads very slowly, users are more likely to abandon it almost straight away. Even if they do not pogo-stick out of the website, it’s unlikely they will go any further into it by visiting other page — which would lead to a high bounce rate. To improve the bounce rate and minimise the possibility of pogo sticking, make sure that your website loads within one-three seconds. On average, 74% of users quit a web page that does not load in 5 seconds.

2. Misleading titles

Misleading titles is one of the more common reasons why people pogo-stick out of a web page almost instantly. If they read a title, click on the search engine result snippet, and find that the content is not what they were promised, they will exit your website. That not only hurts your website’s credibility, but it also pushes up the bounce rate and sends Google a negative signal that your site’s result isn’t serving its purpose.

3. A boring headline and intro

Misleading titles are bad, but then so are boring headlines and introductory paragraphs. The attention span of an average online user is now 7 seconds. You must grab the attention of your website visitors as soon as possible. The right headline and introduction are crucial for this. Otherwise, despite how good the rest of your content may be, you may end up losing your top position in the search engine results page (SERP for short).

4. A cluttered website design

Sometimes, a cluttered website design can turn off users. If they don’t like how your website looks, they are unlikely to venture further into your website. This will eventually result in a higher bounce rate.

5. A poor navigation structure

If you want your visitors to explore more of your website, you must have a clean, clear, and well-designed website navigation structure. Make sure the menu bar is always available and accessible by users. Also use terminologies that the average internet user is familiar with – no overly confusing words. You should also use widgets that help with website navigation, e.g., related articles, top posts, and add internal linking within the body copy of your webpage content.

Conclusion

Bounce rate may not have a big direct impact on how high your website ranks in the SERPs, but it is important nevertheless. It helps you to identify that your website may not be as interesting as you think. You can also identify which web pages are particularly boring to your users by sorting bounce rates by web pages. Moreover, you can also spot if returning users find your website navigation structure simpler — when compared with new users. This can help you set the direction of your next website redesign. Ultimately, by tracking and improving the bounce rate, you will do things that are useful for your website and its search engine rankings.

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Get a Call to Action
What is a Call-to-Action? Well, quite simply it is an element on a web page that encourages a website visitor to take action. This could be clicking a button that links to a contact page, or filling a form in for some sort of incentive; perhaps a free download. Either way, the Call-to-Action is there to catch the attention of your website visitors and to direct them to complete that important action which converts them from a visitor to a lead!

Make it EASY for your visitors to get in touch
As with any sales situation, you must make it easy for your ‘prospect’ (or customer) to say ‘yes’ or decide to contact you. There are so many ways that your prospective customers to contact you in this day and age, you may as well take advantage of all of them; phone, email, mobile, social media, etc. Include your phone number and email address in your header, in a sidebar or on a banner on your website page. Add a link to your contact page with a contact form! Add icons that link to your social pages. How about adding a ‘Request a Call Back’ form/button too?

Install Google Analytics
This fantastic tool from Google not only gives you visitor statistics, real time reports and conversion analytics. You can also take a look at your ‘visitors flow’. This clever tool lets you see how long people spent on your website, which pages they visited (in chronological order) and (more importantly) the page they were on when they left your site. You can then analyse the problem page to see what might have caused them to leave!

Responsive Web Design
We all know the importance of mobiles and tablets when it comes to web design, yet too often we see websites looking terrible on an iPhone, iPad or other smart device. Get a good web designer who will optimise your website to look beautiful on ALL screen sizes and devices. You can’t afford to lose a huge chunk of traffic because of incompatibility issues, or having a non ‘mobile-first’ (as Google calls it) website.

Check & Test EVERYTHING often
Unbelievably, we regularly come across websites that have styling issues, coding errors and buttons that don’t work. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes but it helps to regularly check all of the pages on your website to ensure everything is working correctly.

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Start thinking like your audience
The best place to start when thinking of the design for your website it to start thinking as if you were in the shoes of your target audience. What will they be looking for from your site? What information will they need to see? What features will they benefit from? What images should your website feature?

Include your menu
The food menu is a vital piece of information for any restaurant and your customers will want to be able to view it on your website to get an idea of which dishes they want to order and how much they cost. The most user friendly way of doing this is to have your menu integrated into the design of your website. When given its own page customers will be able to easily find it on your site and browse through quite easily finding all the information they require. Some restaurants simply upload a PDF file of the menu, but we don’t generally recommend this.

Contact Page
It is imperative that your website contains the contact details of your pub or restaurant along with opening hours and location with a Google map where possible. This is all important information that your customers will need to know.

Online Booking Form / system
Most restaurants find it far quicker and easier for both themselves and their clientele if their customers are able to book a table online. The process for this feature should be kept quick and simple and only take them a few clicks to complete. We can either integrate third-party booking systems or affordably build your own booking solution.

Reviews
Love it or loathe it, we live in an age where businesses can quite literally live and die by their reviews. Make it easy for customers to review you by joining respected review websites such as TripAdviser, Google and social media, such as Facebook.

Photos, photos, photos!
Taking professional photos (or having professional photos taken) of all the dishes on your menu will really sell your food – and restaurant – in the best possible light. Remember, people eat with their eyes.

Use social media
If you have social media platforms and your customers go to the effort to follow or like your profiles, the very least you can do is keep your profiles updated on a daily basis. Post photos of dishes, special offers, events and general restaurant pictures so your potential customers can get a feel for your restaurant or pub.

The key to good restaurant and pub web design is to keep your site engaging for your audience which will help encourage them to want to visit your pub or restaurant and also keep them coming back to your website again and again. So if you feel that your restaurant or pub is in need of a new or updated website then please contact us today on 020 3637 4885. If you prefer, you can get in touch via our contact form here!

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Unless you understand who your audience is and what they want, you cannot provide them with the right content. After all, that content has to be engaging, interesting, and useful. Without knowing the problems and the people who are facing them, you cannot provide the right answers.

To help you better understand your audience and research about them when creating an SEO strategy, here are a few tips.

1. Learn who your audience is with Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a wide variety of data to website owners. However, the Audience report is one segment that many SEO professionals and content marketing experts sometimes ignore. If you explore the Google Analytics Audience reports, you will be able to learn who your audience is, what age group they belong to, their geographical location, what interests they have, the behaviour they exhibit on your website, the devices they use, and much more.

By using this information, you can analyse your current SEO strategy and see if you need any make any tweaks. Moreover, by understanding who your readers really are, how they think, and what they want, you will also be able to get a better conversion rate and higher on-page time.

2. Use Google Trends to gather demographics data

Google Trends is one of the most useful tools for content marketers and SEO professionals. But did you know that you can also tie trending topics with location to see how a particular keyword has trended over time in a certain area? This is especially helpful if you have a local business or if you are trying to create a new SEO strategy for a specific region or country. Moreover, by inputting different keywords, you may also unearth new opportunities in geographic areas.

3. Analyse your competitors

Sometimes, the best source of data is your direct competitors. If you already have a few established competitors in your niche (and, really, who doesn’t!), you can gather information about your target audience from them. Quantcast is an excellent tool that analyses other brands and competitors and unearths valuable information about their website visitors — from general interests to demographics to engagement.

Alexa is another tool that you can use for this purpose.

4. Leverage social websites for more information and interests

Audience research would have been so much easier if only we had a website where people willingly entered their information about their interests and activities and continue to update it.

Actually, we do. It’s called Facebook. Facebook has a ton of valuable information about almost all types of target audiences. You only need to tap into it to learn more about your readers and potential customers. If you have your company’s active Facebook page, go to Insights > People and learn about your Facebook fans — from gender segmentation to location and age groups. Then use this information to make sure your content speaks to that group of audience.

5. Talk to your customer support and sales team

Sometimes, you do not need any software or tool to find the most relevant information about your existing and potential customers. If you want to know firsthand about the people you are targeting, talk to your customer support and sales team staff. These two teams interact with existing and potential customers on a regular basis. They are well aware of the problems they are facing and the answers/solutions that work best in each scenario.

Learn about the big problems and convert them into content that you can later optimise for higher rankings in the SERPs. By talking to your sales and customer support team, you can learn insider valuable information and craft truly valuable, informative, and engaging content for your target audience.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, understanding your audience is often the first step towards SEO success. The search engine ranking factors that most SEO professionals are always so concerned about are important, but none of them will work if you don’t understand who your audience is and what they want.

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Here are a few technical and not-so-technical tips that we follow when creating a website and taking into account the requirement for mobile-first browsing:

Design with Mobiles and Tablets in mind
What is a Call-to-Action? Well, quite simply it is an element that calls a website visitor to make an action. This could be clicking a button that links to a contact page, or filling a form in for some sort of incentive; perhaps a free download. Either way, the Call-to-Action is there to catch the attention of the person browsing a website and to direct them to complete that important action which converts them from a website visitor into a lead!

Use Percentages in your CSS
Using percentages for divs and containers in your CSS will allow your columns and other elements to shrink and stretch with the screen size. For example, your header div may be 100% width, your main content may be 70% and your sidebar 30% width. Then combine the width percentages with a max-width value in when using pixels.

Use Media Queries
Media Queries allow you to target specific sized browsers with CSS to only be processed by them. For example, you could set a CSS rule for a screen size of 320px or less which makes your font size bigger and easier to read on a small screen.

Make images flexible
Again, use CSS to target images for when they are being viewed on different devices. I usually set images to 100% width when being viewed on Mobile device screens. This means they are easier to see and click on.

Remember the sizes
As a general rule of thumb, I target up to 320px width for Mobiles; 768px max for Tablets; 1000px for Tablets in landscape mode and anything above for laptop and desktop computers.

Try and use SVG images
SVG images are a new thing. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and make for crystal-clear images on a website that can scale up or down in size without losing clarity or sharpness. SVG is ideal for more simple images, however for images containing more detail, best to stick to PNG.

I hope the above gives you some insight into designing for Mobile and Tablet devices. If you are looking to have a new website built, or perhaps need clarification on the above points then feel free to contact us on 020 3637 4885 or via our contact form! We look forward to hearing from you!

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Why do you want/need a website?
Have a good understanding of why you need your website. Write down a list of the reasons and keep this handy during the production stages so you can keep focused and make sure your website is made with the initial purpose in mind. For example, if you have products to sell, your website will be focused around e-commerce and selling, so think about setting up a PayPal or Stripe account for taking payments, or perhaps a merchant account with your bank and also get all your terms and conditions of sale sorted out too, along with the more obvious content, such as good quality product photos, product descriptions, pricing and any other details needed.

If you are a business that provides services, then your primary website goal will be to feature your services in a brochure-style website. Make sure you create good quality content that explains your services well, with your unique selling points displayed on the homepage / about us page for example. You will also need good quality images on your website too, so always best to source these and get all information together before meeting with a website designer.

Information you will need to gather includes:

• Contact information.
• Social media links.
• All imagery/photos.
• Your logo.
• Product information (project images, pricing, description, weight, variants).
• PayPal or Stripe (or merchant account) details.
• Website text content (for about us page / other informational pages).
• Hosting account details (for putting your website online and email addresses for your business – if you don’t have a hosting account we can help)
• Domain Name registered (we can help with this too if required) or login details to your Domain Name provider if you have already registered it.
• Any legal documents, including privacy policy, cookies policy, terms and conditions of sale and delivery information (for e-commerce).

What type of website should you get?
Once you have determined what the purpose of your website is, you can now decide what type of website you want. A great option for most e-commerce stores is to use WooCommerce. WooCommerce makes it easy for users of all abilities to add products and maintain the website, whereas Magento is far more advanced and is best suited to complex e-commerce websites with many products. WordPress is, in our opinion by far the best option for all businesses. It is also very easy to maintain, and is great for Google too (Google loves WordPress and this helps with rankings).

There are many different possibilities for websites and it is important to choose the correct one for your needs. Using the same examples as above, if you want to sell products online then an online shop (e-commerce site) would be best for your requirements. A business offering services would go for a brochure style website.

Talk to your web designer
Good communication is key. When you start working with a web designer to build your site, try to be as clear as possible about what vision you have. Try to describe in as much detail as possible how you want your website to look, and use diagrams and sketches to help with this. Writing a brief before you first meet with your designer is a good idea as this can be left with the designer to read over and come back with any further questions. Being clear in all areas really will help to avoid any delays in completing the project by having to keep going back and forth with your designer to make unnecessary amendments. If you are very vague about what you want, your web designer will do as they see best, which may be completely different to what you had imagined.

Keeping these points in mind should get your web design project off to the best start. If you want to talk to us about your website design project then please contact us today for an informal chat about your project on 020 3637 4885, or you can contact us via our contact form and we will come back to you!

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If you are in need of a new website or a revamp to an existing site, then we would be delighted to help! To give you an idea of how we work, below is the process that we follow with each of our clients:

Proposal
An initial conversation with you will give us an idea of your requirements which then allows us to create a proposal which provides detailed information about our company, summarises the goals of your project, includes our quote and outlines our terms and conditions.

Consultation
When you have agreed to everything in the proposal the next stage is to send over our briefs, which helps you to frame your thoughts/wants by answering a number of questions.

Design
Once design/visual requirements and preferences have been discussed during the consultation, we get to work building the website, taking into account colours, layouts and more.

Development
The development of the website takes place once we have received all content for the website. This includes logo (if you have had this designed already), images, text content, social media links, contact details and more.

Testing
When the whole website has been built, we then test all the pages. We also include you during this phase and ask you to test the website too, helping us to identify and fix any bugs (if any!)

Launch
When you are happy with the website, it will then be launched so it is live on the World Wide Web for everyone to see!

Marketing

Having a great website for the world to see is one thing, but if the world can’t find it then that is a problem. We always recommend and offer our online marketing solutions, proven to increase website visitors, enquiries and sales. We can arrange a meeting / chat to talk through the options.

If you are in need of a new website or online marketing solutions, then please contact us now to have a chat over your project and ideas!

The post The website design process appeared first on Hatchit Design.

Shopping
It was born as the ‘Glades’, opening in 1991, then brought out years later and re-branded to ‘intu’ but more recently brought back again and re-branded back to the ‘Glades’ – (that’s a lot of buying and selling and renaming!), however regardless of name, this shopping centre offers a choice of over 130 stores making it a shopper’s delight! Another point worth mentioning is the centre-wide free Wifi which is pretty damn reliable and fast.

Crystal Palace Park
Ok, the park isn’t in Bromley town centre but it is in the borough of Bromley so it counts! This historical Victorian pleasure-ground features parkland, full-scale dinosaur sculptures, lakes, the National Sports Centre, a farm and more. Always a great day out with the kids!

Chislehurst Caves
Caves…in London? Yes! These famous caves are just a short drive from Bromley town centre in neighbouring Chislehurst. You can get a guided tour of this labyrinth of man-made tunnels which are as much as 30 metres below the woodland above, and there has been ghostly happenings reported in the caves too, so much so that Most Haunted (TV show) spent two nights investigating the paranormal goings-on back in 2008! Eek!

The Churchill Theatre
The 785 capacity theatre was built in 1977, in the style of a European opera house. Many shows start at this theatre, which makes it a great venue to catch a new musical before it is transferred to the West End. We recently saw a pantomime at the theatre which was fantastic!

The Countryside
Bromley is a suburb in Greater London, but that doesn’t stop it from being 5 minutes from the countryside! A short drive and you are in rural Keston, Farnborough, Biggin Hill, Westerham, Cudham and beyond, where you will find a lovely choice of beautiful country pubs and village-style shopping and dining.

What more would you want from a London suburb other than great shopping, large parks, family attractions, a buzzing night life and local countryside?

The post 5 reasons we love Bromley appeared first on Hatchit Design.

What’s the point?
Before setting ‘pen to paper’ ask yourself these questions; why do I want to redesign my website? What am I hoping to change? What are the goals for this project? Making a list of your motivations for the redesign is so important for two reasons:

• It helps you keep focus on why you’re doing it so that every smaller decision during the process can be challenged against your reasons for the rebuild.
• Goals give you something to measure by when you’ve launched your sparkling new site.

Good, bad and ugly
With your goals and your ‘why’ in mind, have a think about what makes your current site good and what makes it bad; this will enable you to start visualising the end result. You might not like a single thing about your current website, but it’s worth having a think about it before you start from a blank canvas. For example, if your customers love your gallery why change it?

What are your visitors saying?
Look at your website visitor analytics – (the data that tells you how your visitors are engaging with your site). The important things to find out is where your visitors are ‘dropping off’ (that is, what page they are on when they leave your site) and what pages are more successful. For example, if it’s your ‘services’ page that people are exiting your website, you’ll need to focus on making this more engaging to reduce the amount of visitors leaving. If you are working with an online marketing company, they can work closely with you to improve in all these areas.

Must haves
These days, there are a few things your website needs to be successful:

• Blog – keep your customers up-to-date with your latest company news, information about your services and helpful advice. It also tells the search engines that your site is active which helps with SEO!
• Meta Data – tell the search engines what your website is about with snippets of code [Meta Data]. Without this, it will be very difficult to get your website found on search engines.
• Landing pages – your website needs a unique landing page for each service you provide. Make sure this page has a good quality content, your contact details and relevant images.

Don’t 404 me!
When redesigning your website, your page names (and therefore page links) may change. For example, the page previously found at /about-us may now be /about. You need to tell the search engines about your page name change by using what’s called a ‘301 redirect’. If you don’t, the page will be marked as ‘not found’ which can be detrimental to your SEO campaign and annoying for your visitors!

Bonus tip: get a professional in!
Why not get in touch with us to discuss your website redesign? We can make sure your new site is goal-focused, engaging and search engine friendly!

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