YouTube

Author: W&P

Date: 23/09/2024

Bounce rates

Your website may have a sky-high bounce rate. It might be through the roof at this present time? Yet you are now looking for ways in which you could bring that bounce rate right down. Let’s say, for example, that you have set a goal to half the bounce rate on the homepage over the next 3 month and you’re going to use Google Analytics to monitor this reduction.

How to reduce bounce rates

Your local web designers may have recommended that you have a well-designed WordPress website designed, and now it may look amazing. Yet the bounce rate is so high because you haven’t added YouTube videos or a slider to help increase the dwell time, and try to keep those shoppers on the website for as long as possible.

So let us run through some ideas of how you can start to lower that bounce rate

Bounce rates, dwell time and Google Analytics

Here at this web design agency, we have found that embedding a YouTube video onto your homepage can decrease the bounce rate, improve the time on site (dwell time), and improve your organic search engine optimisation if you keep shoppers on your website for longer.

So, by keeping shoppers on your website for longer you can:

– Improve sales
– Reduce bounce rate
– Improve dwell time

One way to do this is to add a YouTube video explaining the benefits of choosing your business.

User experience and conversion rates

When you walk into a shop selling clothes, you’re not just buying clothes; you would like a good shopping experience as you walk around and purchase the items you want.

Perhaps the sales staff are super friendly and helpful, and this creates a pleasant environment to walk around and look at the different clothes.

When buying items online, you will want a good “user experience,” or UX for your shoppers, which many web design agencies call the website’s “U.X.”

This means that your website must offer a good user experience, be simple to use, and offer helpful and valuable information.

To offer a better U.X to your customers, you may want to:

Get a well-designed responsive version of your company website

Use split testing to make gradual improvements

To also monitor bounce rates and try to reduce these as far as possible:

Let’s examine some of the main advantages of embedding YouTube videos to your company website:

So, let’s say someone searches on Google for a service they don’t buy all that often. Let’s say they require the help of a local solicitor, for example a family lawyer. Now, if the first four websites have a lot of text on the homepage, that person might not want to read paragraph after paragraph of the text as they may not have the time.

This is where YouTube videos can be used to convey main selling points quickly

Yet, suppose you were to add a YouTube video introducing the company director or some solicitors are instantly presenting what they can offer the customer.

In that case, this is likely to engage a shopper more, possibly leading to more enquiries as the shopper spends longer on your company website.

After a long day at work, someone may want to watch a very quick 3-minute video of a lawyer explaining the benefits of choosing that solicitor’s practice, as they can get an idea if that solicitors practice is right for them, rather than reading large blocks of text to find if that’s the right company.

So, embedding YouTube videos has the following benefits for your business organic or local SEO

– Able to hold the shopper’s interest for longer (improving dwell time). That’s if you offer valuable and helpful information via your companies YouTube channel
– Embedded YouTube videos may allow you to lower the bounce rate
– Able to convey your company personality and the staff’s personality, a lot better than just asking a shopper to just read the “meet the team” page

Able to convey complex ideas and services

So, let’s say you’re looking to buy a fairly technical item, let’s say solar panels for your business or home. This is not the type of product that’s bought every day, so the customer is likely to have many questions that they would like answered before they purchase the product or the service from the customer.

So, sure, you could, let’s say, ask the web designers to add an accordion (FAQ) to the homepage or the main pages on your WordPress website.

Yet, again, many people may not want to read a lot of text. So, many web design agencies are now recommending that you embed a YouTube video to explain why shopper should choose your business.

So, for example, simply introducing the staff and allowing them to state the services that your business can offer and telling them a bit more about the business. This can help build rapport with the customer.

Help to generate more sales.

So, we think that an excellent video explaining the benefits of choosing your company can have the following benefits for your business sales and SEO.

– Help improve conversions
– Help improve dwell time
– Reduce bounce rate

Help improve sales

So, just as in any good shop, you will have good salespeople. They will help the company to generate more sales by simply answering any questions that the customer might have. Well, YouTube videos embedded on your website’s main pages and product pages can help explain the benefits of choosing that product or service.

For example, a blender is an object that some customers might think is pretty generic. Yet, when you start to explain the many different features that some blenders can have, such as making smoothies etc, and explaining the benefits of owning the product in a video, you will be clearly showing the customer the benefits of owning that item, so they may well be more persuaded to purchase the item from you.

So, it’s your opportunity to:

– Advertise and promote the benefits of purchasing that product
– You can offer an in-depth explanation of why you should choose that product or service
– Allows to explain unique selling points; for example, you might offer an extended warranty period longer than your direct competitors?
– You can keep shoppers on your website for much longer, improving time on site, which, as any good SEO agency will tell you is now a good way of improving your business’s organic search engine optimisation
–

Dwell time and Google Rank Brain.

The huge e-commerce businesses will have teams of staff who are dedicated to A/B testing so that they can improve the SEO in the following ways

– Time on site
– Reduce the bounce rate
– Improve conversions

So, for your business to rank higher on Google.co.uk and Google.com, you must improve what SEO companies call the U.X and the engagement metrics.

Now, to do this, often you will need to do gradual split testing (A/B testing) to see when, let’s say, for example, you may make a slight improvement to the main menu design, whether this helps improve sales or not?

So, with split testing, its about making gradual improvements to the websites design. Then the web design company must see if that change helped improve sales, the company will keep that change, if it has the opposite effect, the business will revert the change back.

So, often, substantial e-commerce retailers do a lot of split testing, also referred to as A/B testing, to see if they can improve their organic SEO. To do this, they often have to improve the U.X, and to that, they often have to do the following:

– Make the company website faster
– Make it more straightforward for customers to find the product or service they want
– Offer a good U.X for example, making the main menu simpler to use
– Keep the shopper on the website for longer (improving dwell time)
– They often have to make sure that a good well written product description is added to help the customer to work out if that’s the right item for them
– They have to make sure all of the SEO work is white hat
– They also have to make sure that all of the text that the copywriters write meets the standard of writing set in Google’s E-EAT advice

An explainer video

Some products and services don’t need explaining because they are self-explanatory- such as lets say a 100% organic chocolate bar.
However, some products and services are much more technical and therefore require more explaining and clarification on the benefits that the product can bring to the customer. For example, if you’re hiring a web designer, you may have never hired a web design agency before, so you may want to know how the service works.

Therefore if the digital marketing agency was to have say their main web developer explain the process from start to finish, this may retain a shopper on the website for longer. This may result in more sales, as the video may answer questions that the shopper may have.

Why we recommend adding an explainer video to your website

Adding an explainer video’s always a good idea whether you’re a dentist or a builder.
Yet we would highly recommend supplementing the explainer video with text. That is plain text that Googlebot can crawl and index, so that this can help improve your businesses SEO.

You can add a title to your YouTube video. This gives Google (Alphabet) a good idea of what the video is about. So, for example, if you were to title it “Family Lawyers—how to Start the Divorce Process,” Google will then know that you are likely to run a family law practice and therefore are offering some helpful tips to couples about to embark on the divorce process.

Yet, at the same time, you might have someone answering this question for, say, well over 30 minutes, yet Google will not know other than the title what the video is about.

This is why we recommend supplementing every video with text below so Googlebot can know exactly what that video is about.

Add a summary below the YouTube video to explain what the presenter is saying:

So, if your web designers were to add text, to explain what the video is about, what could happen then is that “Googlebot” would crawl and index the text.

If Google’s algorthim deems the information as good quality, then the content marketing can help enhance your business’s organic or local search engine optimisation.

So, when adding YouTube videos to your company website, we recommend doing the following.
– Write text to offer further helpful advice, which Googlebot can then index
– Bullet point some of the answers so that you offer a summary of what the text is about

In summary

We think it’s an excellent idea to embed a YouTube video on your main pages and blog posts, where you especially where have evergreen content marketing and on the homepage. Often, when you look at Google Analytics, the main product or service pages usually be the pages which have the most organic visitors. Therefore, for your business to rank higher in the organic search engine results pages, we recommend improving the dwell time and reducing the bounce rate by embedding YouTube videos.

For example, why not have a member of staff who’s an expert on that particular product or service explaining the benefits of choosing your company.

This can help improve time on-site, also known as “dwell time”, and reduce the company’s bounce rate.

You might embed a YouTube video onto the following pages:

• The homepage
• The About Us page
• Company History
• Meet the team
• Main product pages
• Main service pages

How we can help:

We are a web design company; we have highly experienced web designers working for us. We can offer the following services:

WordPress web designers

We are able to quickly ascertain how our customers would like their websites designed. The vast majority of the websites we design are built using the content management system WordPress.

Seo (organic and local)
If your business needs to improve its organic search engine optimisation, why not call us?