Yesterday, Gracemere Wreckers became PickaPart Rockhampton. It’s more than just a name change, you can now search or browse their available stock online, and the new website also features a full price list.

The administration section of the website features a full inventory management system, including stock rotation management. It also draws a location map on-the-fly, pinpointing the location of selected vehicles to make the job of finding them a bit easier.

Well, it depends!

What’s a Bounce?

Basically, if someone visits one page of your website, and only one page, it’s classed as a bounce.

Typically, it will mean that someone has found your site via a search engine, looked at the first page they landed on, and then hit the back button.

You may find this thought horrifying – but there are valid reasons why Bounces may occur:

1. They are not in your physical area. If you’re an accountant, and someone from France manages to find your site, there is a pretty good chance they’ll never become a client anyway. Let them bounce.
2. You don’t actually solve their problem. Some keywords are not really good ones to chase – many are too generic. If you run mine safety training courses, you may think that “training” would be a good keyword. Except for all the people that search for dog training, sales training, weight training… Even though the keyword may be relevant in a generic sense – you may not be what your visitor is looking for.
3. Random keywords and search terms. To illustrate: back in 2004 I posted a short piece after Anna Meares won her Gold Medal in Athens (link). Shortly after, I noticed a lot if incoming traffic from people who had “googled” for her name. Were those people looking for our services at the time? Nope. They bounced. But that’s okay, we were getting traffic from a keyword totally unrelated to what we do.

So, you’ll see that you will always have some bounces. The number without context doesn’t mean much. Not all bounces are bad though – in these examples your website is helping to qualify your leads. If you can’t help them, you don’t want to be spending time answering emails and phone calls.

Killer Bounces

What hurts is a bounce from someone who lives in an area that you service (or can service) – and who has searched for a keyword that accurately matches your business.

How do you find this out? What can you do about it?

We’ll look at these issues next month!

(Haha – I feel like Eddie McGuire leaving people hanging during the ad break on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire!)

And if you can’t wait until next month for the answer – contact me to arrange an analysis of your website’s performance.

We developed the original Kanimbla Charters site back in 2005, and it was one of the first client sites we developed using Wordpress to manage the Trip Report section.

A lot has changed in 5 years!

Kanimbla Charters 2005 version

Besides a fresh look, the new website now has every page editable by our client (not really a practical option back in 05) and much improved photo gallery mamagement.

I want one. An island, that is, not a turtle.

There’s really not much more to say!

Why?

1. That particular page is likely to be themed towards that location, so someone searching for your business in a specific location will be more likely to find it via search engines
2. Finding your contact details is one of the main things visitors to your website will be trying to do. If you have this information neatly organised (and not hidden behind gimmicky forms), you give them a better experience, regardless of how they managed to get to your website in the first place
3. Even better – embed a location map on each page as well, so they can print it off and use it as a reference!

Really simple advice – but often overlooked.

• To tell people who you are
• To tell people how to contact you
• To reaffirm your brand
• To make it easy to ‘file’ you for future reference

What should your business card do?

• Inspire confidence
• Provide relevant, correct information
• Have a clear message – call me, contact me, email me!
• Save you money by getting happy clients to work for you…

How does your business card work?

The most important part to getting your card to work is to share it! Give your happy clients 2 or 3 cards and ask them to share those with people they know might require your service. If you clean carpets… if you design houses… if you fix cars… if you sell cars… encourage your happy clients to provide you with more happy clients!

Viral marketing, without the internet!

We know that we need the fundamental details like name, phone, email, address, web and possibly a short list (perhaps 4 points) of services/offerings.  That shouldn’t take up too much space, and if you have a double sided card, you could relocate some of the information to the reverse.

Make it easy for your clients or prospective clients to find the relevant information first – your name and contact. For the rest they can flip the card over.

What about the design? Although all of this is a personal choice, and depends on your sort of business, if we take a corporate or professional approach, here is one way to approach it:

1. How many fonts do you use?
2. How many colours?
3. How many elements?
4. How much contrast between colours?
5. How much rest or ‘white’ space do you need?
6. Do you need photos?

Let’s use Telstra as an example (seeing as everyone knows their brand) – this is how they use those 6 points:

1. One for all text and perhaps a second that is defined in the logo itself
2. Two
3. Logo and one item of branding
4. As much as possible
5. As much as possible
6. No!

If in doubt, use the ‘less is more’ tactic – and you will never have a design that is too busy.

This second incarnation of the CQ NRL Bid website has a higher focus on some more strategic goals for the bid, rather than just being primarily a news channel like the first generation.

It features an online store, membership registration and a backend database, streaming video and news archive with more to come.

So how do you make it successful? This very topic was discussed on a recent edition of BoagWorld, and I have summarised the main points here:

1. Your posts don’t have to be long. Only have a couple of paragraphs to write? That’s fine. (In fact, shorter posts may even be read by more people than longer posts.)
2. Keep a list of ideas. Often when it comes time to sit down and write, you struggle to come up with something. However, you’ll think of great ideas in the shower, or somewhere equally inconvenient. When you have that moment of inspiration, make a quick note of it somewhere. That way, when it’s time to write, you can just pull out that list and get started!
3. Vary the type of post you do. There’s a huge list of different ways you can attack your blog, including:
   1. Asking questions and inviting comments
   2. Doing an interview
   3. Case studies (don’t make it too self-congratulatory though – does it interest the reader?)
   4. Event reviews or previews
   5. Multimedia posts that include audio, video, or both
   6. Commentaries – posts that comment on something you have read elsewhere
   7. News – industry or sector news that would interest your reader
   8. Reviews – books, software, services, and so on
   9. Hints and tips – brief ones
   10. Tutorials – more in-depth
   11. Lists – everyone loves a top-10 list! (Don’t they?)
   12. Resources
   13. Predictions
   14. Debates – put forward opposing viewpoints and invite comments
4. Don’t be too critical of your writing. Obviously check it for spelling and grammar, but don’t be too much of a perfectionist or you’ll never publish anything!
5. Believe you have something of value to say! Even if you think everyone already knows what you’re writing, there is often value in getting a refresher. How often do you hear, “I already know it, but it was good to hear it again anyway.”

I may have to take some of this advice myself!

Our redevelopment of the Gladstone Economic and Industry Development Board’s website involved going back to basics.

We analysed the old website and looked at their main goals, compared with what pages visitors were actually getting to. As a result, we now have simpler, cleaner website with clearer paths to conversions (visitors actually getting to the goal pages and performing predefined actions).