You may have heard the adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’

Too many people believe that being the top of Google for their keywords is the answer to all their dreams and the traffic will pour in, and from that the leads and conversion will result in all the online sales they can handle. Oh if only!

With Pay per click you can be top of Google for your keywords in a couple of days, for sure and you can pay a company to drive lots of web traffic to your site quite easily, just get your credit card out that’s it!

Most analytical programmes like Google analytics have a term for how quickly people leave your website called bounce rate, and this to me is far more important than where they come from and what page/post they looked at, because a bounce rate more than 80% is telling me that 80% of people hit your site and are leaving within 30 seconds.

Imagine you had a physical shop in a mall selling, say, antiques, and people are pouring into your shop all day, but you notice they hardly look at any of your statues, vases, or ornaments, they literally walk in, sort of feel uncomfortable, and walk out almost as quick as they walked in, you would certainly have a staff meeting and or simply ask a few shop visitors to find out what is going wrong. Yet very few people look at their website analytics.

If your bounce rate is more than 75% then spending any sort of money on traffic creation is a complete waste of money, try to sort out your shop first. Find out why they are leaving so fast.

Most websites are corporate’ hard sell’ sites, this is what we do, and this is how you buy it, kind of websites, but people want a more personal touch, so they are not getting the rapport they are needing for you to close the deal.

In my experience there are two types of websites: B2C (business to customer) websites like Amazon and  eBay etc. where online clients will try once, and as long as they get the book or item of eBay they then trust the site, and begin a long time love affair buying regularly.

Then there are B2B (business to business) websites where you are really chasing an appointment to meet and start the consultative sales process. If you are the latter, you are going to need to get your bounce rate less than 60% and you are going to have to establish a rapport.

How do you establish this trust before you have even met them? Think about your favourite author or columnist, you feel you know them yet, you have never met them because they established their brand and reputation in their books, magazines and online. You can do the same by blogging.

If you are passionate about your business and you feel you are the best at what you do then stretch your creative juices, buy a keyword rich domain, build a blog, and create content on a separate blog site that sets you apart from your competitors and get that content to feed web visitors to your corporate website. You will see your bounce rate improve, then, you will have more chance of making an appointment. More appointments mean more sales; well it did when I was at sales school!

To learn how to develop online  trust and brand yourself effectively online contact Netmediauk