As I am into the online marketing field, I read a lot about SEO. This is my first post about SEO, so please don't be harsh in the comments. The Panda update is what made the SEO community roar about how many websites lost ranking and so on. There is so little information about the ones that benefited from the update and we are one of the winners.
I personally think that the Panda update made the SERPs quality a lot better and to some point buried the medium to low quality websites deep into the results. Even some of the high-authority websites went down.
I will share some insights of an user generated moving reviews website MyMovingReviews.com and how we got positively impacted by the Panda update. The website features many US and Canadian moving companies and provides the opportunity for people to rank them and write moving reviews. In addition to that, there is a blog/article section with moving tips and info.
Industry specifics that influence the analytics data
Before we begin, you should know that the specifics of the industry add some additional noise to the analytics data. These are the main trends in the moving industry:
- Weekly trends: People search a lot more about moving services at the beginning of the week on working days. Mondays are usually the most active days. We assume that people usually search for movers at work during work hours.
- Monthly trends: People search for movers more by the end of the month and less in the middle of the month and during holidays.
- Seasonality: People search 30% more for movers in the summer months than during the rest of the year. Nobody wants to move in the winter (especially in the Northern states).
The First Panda update
Since the first Panda update in 2011 we started seeing some increase in rankings. Because of the specifics of user behavior in our industry, the analytics data is looking weird but you can see the pattern.
Further benefits from the Panda update
As we saw a huge opportunity in the Panda update, we tried to adjust the website to better suit the visitors, give them alternatives once they visit the website and make visitors consume more of the moving industry related content. The goals were to increase the time on site, reduce the bounce rate and increase the pages per visit.
What we did to increase rankings/visitors
1. Reducing the bounce rate
We started by working on the high bounce rate pages. We edited some of the content and deleted some of the pages. One of the very high bounce rate pages were the blog section posts. Since we are always committed to build only high quality content, we knew that the problem with the high bounce rate on the blog was elsewhere. We knew that visitors were able to find the information they were searching for and after that they were leaving the blog. We added a suggestion fly-box. The box appears on the right side of the page once the visitor scrolls by the end of a post and suggests another random post from the blog. This had a huge impact on the blog bounce rate by lowering it with more than 30%. From the highest bounce rate section of the website, the blog became the lowest one overnight.
2. Creating a mobile website
We have about 11 percent mobile visits (we don't consider iPads to be mobile traffic). We decided to further lower the bounce rate by creating a full-featured mobile website. This of course brings the benefit of higher conversion rates. We've been postponing the mobile website for some time now and we finally decided to finish it and launch it by December. We kept the same URLs as the desktop version and only changed the templates.
3. More content
A part of the Panda update is the amount of content on page. We didn't want to have many pages with thin content so we increased the minimum text required for a moving review to be posted. After reading about how Zappos corrected the spelling mistakes of all their reviews, we additionally wanted to avoid spelling mistakes as much as possible. We included a spell checker on the moving review form. We are also planning to correct the mistakes on all old reviews in the future.
To recap, here are the changes we did:
- Editing some of the content with the highest bounce rate.
- Adding a spell checker on the write a review page and setting a higher minimum amount of text for the reviews.
- Giving suggestions to users once they finish reading a blog post to reduce the bounce rate.
- Started a mobile website to reduce the bounce rate and time on site for mobile visitors.
The results
We had almost 50% increase in visits in the next one-two months. Please note that we introduced most of the changes in December, so we can't really measure how fast these changes influenced the rankings because of the holidays. Not surprisingly, the largest part of the increase was from the blog as this is where we managed to reduce the bounce rate the most.
Conclusion
I can't say that all of the gained increase of visitors came because of the above changes, but given the changes and tactics we did at the time, these were the most significant ones. Targeting the visitor and thinking of how to enhance the customer experience results in more visitors. It is as simple as that. Working on the design and thinking of techniques to reduce the bounce rate will result in better rankings, especially if you are a high-traffic website.
What do you think about the bounce rate and its impact on rankings/visitors? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.
Great Post. I took the same approach when Google Panda came out. I made sure everything was relevant, unique, and top quality. I posted more articles then all my competitors, and I used many variations of my keywords. I used copyscape and checked for duplicate content. I found a site that was duplicating my content, using their own links, and not giving back any author credit (trackback). I sent them emails and they did not remove the posts. Then I reported them to Google and poof they fixed my problem. Google sent me an email that they sent this site a message, and if they do not remove my articles they will be deindexed.
We also created a mobile version around the panda time.
Reducing bounce rate is good for most scenarios. However, bounce rate can be tricky with certain pages like a landing page or an affiliate network. Bounce rate only applies to entry pages. If the user finds what they are looking for right away (such as a phone number, adress, fax number, PDF, brochure and the list goes on.)
The way I see it is, just give Google what they want, regardless of the shady things your competitors do. For one day they will get kicked out and you can hold your rankings you have earned. Well that day came for me! :) I've watched many competitors get knocked off the SERP since.
The mobile version advice is a very good one. The shift in traffic patterns are very significantly slanted toward mobile at this point and it's a factor a lot of businesses still ignore. The problem here is one of impression, Google algorightms changes are apparent on a large site, but for a smaller site, I have seen business owners blaming Google/Panda for their diminishing success when the traffic had shifted towards mobile relatively quickly. The best example of that is the restaurant category with the growing popularity of Yelp and Fousquare. One restaurant owner came to me with a -25% diminution in traffic in 3 weeks, blaming panda(last summer) and after a bit of research I found out their Foursquare page was created and they had received 120+ checkins over that 3 weeks period.
Interesting to see they took action! I've had the same issue twice. In one case, they started linking me, so I got some benefit, and in the other case they sent a polite email back removing the content - as you did, it's always worth asking first about this stuff.
To decrease our bounce rate, we put a world of thought into our homepage - what will make people want to click through the site and really interact with it. We put a little calculator relevant to our industry and a few online property check tools (we deal with solar panels), which made a great difference to visitor interaction.
Thanks for your comment. It is very interesting that Google got into the problem. This is something I'll have in mind for the future.
In regards to the bounce rate, I think there are two types of bounce rate scenarios:
Also I think the time on site affects the rankings positively.
I have been batteling on a forum about this for a couple month now lol... Maybe youd like to join this thread..https://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/82084-whats-your-bounce-rate-32.html#post1866796 I also included some parts of your blog post within the thread. (and yes I trackbaked to this post)
I'm impressed by how much your bounce rate reduced with the suggested article flyout. I've seen those on an increasing number of blogs lately and have thought about trying it out but never saw any data to suggest if it was worth it. I think I will give it a shot now!
I am glad I helped. Share some insights once you have the data from your experient. I am curious if that works on other types of blog (other industries).
Thanks for sharing the experience - is it possible that some of these results came about simply because you put more resource and focused more on content creation and the type of content you're creating?
That is possible. I think both the reduced bounce rate and the high quality content in combination help for increasing the traffic. The thing is that the rate with which we created the new content with the amount of the increased traffic did not match up as the traffic increased with a lot more.
These things seem to grow exponentially rather than steadily if you have a decent content strategy in place.
Martin, this is interesting indeed! The idea of reducing the bounce rate is very creative and logical at the same time. I mean if the people reading the article come till the end and find another post relevant to the topic I believe more than 50% of the people should check the related post!
Here is another idea that I believe can help one in multiple ways that includes reducing the bounce rate on the blog!
This is quite easy to create a test (multiple choice QnA) about different topics in your niche that you think most audience will be interested in participating and at the end of the blog one can invite them to test their skills or similar attractive tag line that encourage them to click!
Click will take them to the quiz/test page.. you can also get other benefits like link baiting, increase the number of subscribers and stuff but adding a invitation at the end of the blog will help you reducing the bounce rate of the blog #justathought!
Thanks for the advice. I will give it a though and I think we can try that.
Sounds Great! I have plan to work on our company blog as well but there are lot of other stuff in priority so we have to put this down the line!
Love the short QnA survey idea Moosa!
I'm Working with an online travel company and I can see this working really well to increase user engagement while also gathering some useful information about travel needs, tour preferences etc.
Thanks for sharing that :)
Sha
I think, in general, all the recent results of google are one HUGE bug...the entire SE is a bug in my opinion :P ...and these rankings for those keywords are just one example from millions.
Great post, never tried fly-box reduced your bounce rate... Sounds like I should check it out.
Great. Please share your results too once you have enough data. I am really curious how that works for other types of websites.
Hello JSrampton,
Can you tell me about fly-box. what is fly-box?
Nice first post. Since these Panda updates, there has been so much talk, and I have been really honest with people and telling them my experience, that my "gray hat" projects have suffered, but my main blog and company website have not, in fact they're still gaining as if nothing happened. The reason is simply the tactics used. I never use shady tactics that Google wouldn't approve of on the sites I really care about, and they do fine.
Those sites where I do more "tricks" or shady stuff get more traffic, until an update like this comes along. So the best choice is clear: be honest and white hat with the sites you care about. Focus on content instead of SEO.
Hey Jeremy,I agree with you completely. Being white hat guarantees you good rankings in the future algo updates as they are targeted with the visitor in mind. The best SEO technique is to think what the visitor would like to see/read/do and create the best content. Making the visitor stay more on your properties/websites will additionally increase the chances of converting.
We always try to be better than the competition. When we have a piece of content created, we want to make sure it is better than the content already created on the subject and that it covers the topic in-depth. Also it is a good practice to utilize text, images, PDFs and videos where appropriate.
Content is so important now and you are right the length matters. As a writer I have gone from doing many 400 word posts to 800+ word posts because of the update. I don't mind the extra cash!!
I think the ideal length for a quality article would be 700-1000 words with 2-3 high quality images to increase engagement. Very important is for the post to be easy to scan before reading. We try to use a lot of formatting elements as H tags, bullet points an occasionally bold and italics. Also having great captions under images helps a lot.
Of course all that could be the topic of another post.
Hey Martin,
By optimizing your web graphics in Photoshop can decrease the time it takes to load your site (something I need to do more as my sites tend to be slower than other sites). I would also compare your site with other sites in your niche at pingdom.com. Anything you can do to beat your comp and enhance the users experience on your website will help you out in Google.
Also, good idea on removing low value content and pages with an extremely high bounce rate. If you don't want to remove the content you could always greatly increase the quality of content on that site to help improve your bounce rate.
Totally agree. Load time is very important. This is why we moved to cloud front to make sure the site loads fast. There are some great tools that can decrease the image size significantly with little or no loss of quality. This should be considered especially for mobile versions.
The image size (or more to the point, using scaled images in Wordpress) turned out to be the real problem for a client of mine who came to me because they had been "panda slapped".
When I highlighted the load speed problems being caused by sitewide scaling of massive images (sometimes scaled to thumbnails!) the client said "actually, we added all of those images to posts around the same time we got hit by panda"
Guess what? It wasn't really a genuine Panda slap.
Two lessons here for site owners, developers and SEOs called in to fight off the Panda
Sha
I love case studies like this, these are sites I can relate to. Thanks for sharing. I do feel your homepage is still a bit ad heavy, and the stock photo's don't really do good for the "credit card test" so you might want to look into that.
All three points depicted are good strategies for most of scenarios..
I would add a fourth one: fitting web structure and layout for Google Panda 2012..
Good article Martin. (Y)
David
GReat post! Thanks a lot for sharing your practical experience with us! Totally agreed, that Panda update is all about improving and working on the quality of the content. The content ought to be informative and appealing to user and at the same time it should devoid of any kind of grammatical errors.
Second thing you mentioned is the bounce rate of your pages. Definitely a high-bounce rate of your web-page is not going to be in your favor and you tackled the situation very intelligently by putting a comment box at the end of your blog post.
Third and the last one was the Mobile version of your website. Mobile search is going to be the most important search technology and people are coming to mobile search than any other platform. Viewing it's importance and significance it was very true to prepare a mobile version of your website.
Liked the way you presented the whole experience.
Give me a thumbs up if you think seo moz needs a mobile stylesheet
Oh Yeah! It definitely needs one.
Nice article, I'm always open to improving visitor engagement.
I've noticed the fly-box on an online newspaper that I read, and it has unquestionably increased my own interaction. Plus it's a nice eye-catching piece of dynamic content, which you could use anywhere on a website, at any time, to introduce a call to action.
Before we introduced the fly-box we did some brainstorming of what we loved as design elements when we surf online. This was one of the suggestions everyone agreed upon.
Nice article. I find it interesting that the suggestion fly-box reduced your bounce rate. If the blog post that they are reading is relevant to what they were searching for, then why would another suggested random article keep them from bouncing?
Hey Ryan,
the fly-box works best with niche websites. If the visitors land on a page/post and they find it really useful/informational/engaging, then there is a great probability that they will want to read more on the topic. Another thing is that the fly-box appears at the end of the article and offers a natural continuence of the visit. Having great images with descriptive text help a lot.
We try to utilize every visitor going through the main and secondary conversion points and at the end we try to make them a part of the community by following us in the social networks.
Can I ask which flybox you used? I tried The Slide by Simple Reach and it never worked. I'm currently looking for another one.
It is a highly modified version of the upPrev plugin for WordPress.
Thanks Martin, For the Post and the plugin. I was in search of this type of good WordPress plugin.
Thanks Martin. It's great and useful post. I'll try to use the plugin to reducing the bounce rate
I've been on the hunt for a Simple Reach alternative too - thanks! :)
Thanks for the information Martin, it is very helpful.
It's like when you visit youtube with the idea of watching just one video. You finish your video, you glance at the related videos on the right side......BOOM....all of a sudden you've spent 3 hours on youtube instead of just spending 3 or 5 minutes(on the first video).
The suggestion fly-box is a great idea. This is something that we will be implementing on our website.
I like this too: "Redesinging the website more frequently affects the rankings in a positive way. At least this is what we've observed since we do a lot of minor template edits on a regular basis."
That bodes well for those of us in the custom website design business!
Nice post martin, am glad atleast we have someone who got benefits out of Google Panda. well preseneted article with very valid solutions to Google Panda!
Nice to see an example of somebaody winning with the Panda update and actually using it to their advantage. Aiming at giving visitors the best experience when using your website is so important and this helps highlight this act, some SEOs lose sight of the fact that your website is for human visitors and you should design the site around them not purely around search engines. I think a great example of losing site of this is over-optimised titles, they might make you rank well but if they look spammy your are likely to get less click throughs from the SERPs - people are wising up to this sort of tactic in my opinion.I have always tried to produce good quality content that would serve the visitor and by doing this I have usually seen a low bounce rate on pages and websites as an average.
I can't agree more. Aiming for the visitors guarantees that Google will favor your website sooner or later. Panda was a great update.
Excellent piece Martin!
All of us here wanted to know as much as possible all the things about this Panda Update. We can note that there are still a handful of SEO newbie who remain unlettered and confused with it. As long you have a fully functional website with quality content and will satisfy your visitors,You can sleep well without worrying about how it may affect your website's ranking.
Anyway,Hoping for more interesting post from you.
Nice article Martin, "Giving suggestions to users once they finish reading a blog post to reduce the bounce rate." simple modification created nice results - flybox... cool tip - thanks Martin :-)
Andy :-)
The fact that the Google Bots are starting to take User Metrics of websites into account a lot more in order to determine the ranking position of your website. Should make people sit up and take note of this post.
Great work Martin!
I still don't get why people don't click on the weekly trends button in analytics surely if you're analysing data over 20 or so weeks, guess I'm the only one haha!
The mobile site tip is definitely great advice. In some of my sites, the mobile traffic (I, too don't consider tablets as mobile), is as much as 30%.
Implementing a mobile version will not only help with your bounce rates, but it can also improve your ads revenue.
The best way to do it is to detect user agents and serve the relevant page to users using the same URL. I'd avoid redirects and subdomains for mobile content. Plus going with a single url approach ensures all inbound links and social shares go to one URL.
If you're using Wordpress, I highly recommend just using the MobileSmart plugin along side the user agent detection in W3 Total Cache and custom designed mobile theme. The other solutions just don't do it right.
I totally agree Kevin. Mobile (Smartphone) version is a must. Using the same URL is the option we choose too. We totally redid the experience for the mobile. I personally would like to see a smarthone version of SEOmoz for example because I browse from mobile a lot.
The only thing I am not sure about with the mobile version on the same URL is what happens if there is a difference in the content on the desktop and the mobile version. For example if you have a shortened (briefened) version of the content for the mobile (especially for the text rich pages) will that affect your rankings and if it does - which ones - the desktop of the smartphone ones. There is still not enough info on smartphone SEO.
I've displayed slightly different or shorten/summarized versions of pages. For example, it might make sense consolidate the homepage of your mobile version. In mobilising over a dozen sites using the "same url" method, I've never noticed in a negative impact in rankings.
Google has separate crawlers for mobile and full version. So i think if you mark up your pages properly, they'll understand what's going on. The mobile crawlers even emulate various user agents since sites may display different content based the type of mobile device.
I enjoyed your post, Martin. It's good to hear about website's "winning" with the changes you made and the new algorithm. For our site, things about stayed the same but then once we started blogging and pushed a complete redesign of the website we have seen great results. Way ahead of where we were a year ago.
I liked how you analyzed and made changes based on BR. That's one of the main metrics I look at too. Speak of, I think it's about time I give our site another run-down and make changes based on visitor metrics. I think since blogs tend to have high bounce rates by nature, it's worth testing to see what ways will keep visitors sticking around.
Again, good post. Thanks for sharing your success with us!
Lowering the bounce rate is fun. We did a lot of experiments and we finally lowered the bounce rate a lot. Especially for the blogs, there is a lot that can be done. I think that many big brands out there are underestimating their blogs - no images (only text posts), poor navigation, simple templates, lack of call to action and lack of consistency with the rest of the website are the main reasons for the big bounce rate.
Redesinging the website more frequently affects the rankings in a positive way. At least this is what we've observed since we do a lot of minor template edits on a regular basis.
Nice Post - very insightful information on how to increase page views, reduce bounce rate and time on site......similar post was written by John Doherty in October 2011, check it out good information with what plugin to use for flyout related post https://www.johnfdoherty.com/positive-site-metrics-with-nrelate-flyout-plugin/
Great article! Thank you for ideas. Since Google update, we've been focusing on link building and content stratgegy, it's good to re-evaluate our improvement from user engagement point o f view.
Congratulations too!
Love the idea of the suggestion fly-box. We've already put this in force on our site.
Another great idea: "We included a spell checker on the moving review form. We are also planning to correct the mistakes on all old reviews in the future."
Luckily we didn't get chewed by panda or penguin or sunk by Venice, its boring, but content & partnerships win out.
Thanks to Panda for getting rid of so many badly annoying affiliate sites, you know something like nikon4593bestreview.biz and such, at least that's a benefit for me :)
This recent update functions like an antibiotic, killing bad organisms, but also destroying some good and healthy ones in the process. Perfectly legitimate businesses are getting wiped off the search results because of unethical practices from competitors. In other words, simply blast a competitor’s site with spam and watch it slowly drown into the abyss...
Hi, i read this google panda update. you are really very good explain this information. I like it.
Panda helped us too. After learning about the features of sites that Panda hated, we took steps to ensure our site didn't have a single one of these features. Oh, and we wen't from #8 to #3!
Just want to say great post
Nice post to read about bounce rate. Creating mobile site is really good solution for this. Last panda update is really horrible and one of my projects keywords are now out of top 10.
It's very usefull post I've taken something for me
Hello,
This is really interesting to know. I still wonder, will people really click on the suggestions box or related topics links. I heard that google hates high bounce rate sites. Is there any standard way of reducing it other than related posts plugins or suggestion boxes ?
Thank you.
I think the bounce rate varies a lot based on the industry and the content. Example of low bounce rate content will be videos or online games for example.There are some common things that should generally result in lower bounce rate as suggestion similar content by the end of the page or pagination (splitting a great article into two pages). The bottom line is that the content should be unique and engaging.
Glad to see someone calling out Bounce Rate. I believe engagement metrics (bounce, time on site, pages/visit, etc) are only going to become more relevant in Google's search signals. Standard blocking and tackling is obvious but 2012 should be focused on user experience and CRO.
I have to tell you it is a great sweet article. You gave me some points to think of.
Thanks keep writing!
Really enjoyed this post on ways to improve your website. Must have been challenging implementing so many changes at once during an already busy period.
It was challenging yes. But as we strive to become the leader in our niche, we had to react. In every major Google update lays a huge opportunity. This is why I am so excited and I can’t wait for the new algo updates to strike.
Thank you for sharing your experiences Martin.
The idea of the fly box to suggest another post is a really good one and makes sense given that even the NY Times use something similar.
I've found the title of the post slightly misleading but it definitely works in terms of CTR. What I mean by that is that it wasn't really Panda the reason that traffic went up but what you actually implemented on the site. Probably these actions would have had the same impact pre Panda too.
I was just wondering how much of the traffic increase can be attributed to the actions you mentioned as opposed to seasonality. You mentioned that more people are willing to move in the summer and less in the winter so could a large part of the traffic increase be due to that trend? How does year on year traffic look like? The graph you've provided shows a steady increase from Feb to May which seems to be in agreement with the trends you've described.
January and February are very slow months for the moving industry, that is why I assume that the results are based on the changes we did. The MyMovingReviews year after year traffic is on the uptrend since the launch in 2008, but based on other websites in the industry and our last year's data, there is no significant uprise in searches in the beginning of a given year.
Last year we monitored slight increases in traffic even at the end of the season and the uptrend continued, but that was based on other changes we did back then. This increase on the other hand is a very significant one. Oh, did I mention that we increased the conversion rate too.
Great Tips !! I was looking for these tips.I have searched a lot of time in google for getting the info about how to get benefited from Google panda? Finally, I got everything I need for my site.Thanks
Damm true Post. I think if Every one use this approach then no one hit by panda.
Thanks for Sharing such a nice post :)
Great, I love those kind of posts.
I have a question, you said you increased the mimimum amount of text allowed for new content... What is the number? From 200 words to 400 words? Im curious.
Thanks +1
We have different types of content on the website. Some of it is user generated like reviews and post comments, as well as facebook comments. We wanted to make sure that we didn't have any new thin pages created.
For the moving reviews, pre Panda we had a minimum of 50 characters per review which was too low. Of course most of the reviews were a lot larger than that but occasionally there were some single sentence reviews of not so significant value.
We believe in high quality content and its impact on rankings. I've monitored that the best content gets more and more visited overtime.
Great article. Bounce rate is important and so it is important to provide users with more accessiblity to other content through the landing page.
Curious to know about https://www.mymovingreviews.com/ - is it a static site or is it powered by WP/Drupal type platform?
I am looking for information about responsive designs for a site which static files.
Mahesh
Hi Mahesh,
If it is the related post feature you are looking for, take a look at my Youmoz post Adding "Related Post" Links Without a Database.
The script allows you to add related post suggestions to a static site. Might be a help.
Sha
Hi Martin,
I do find the fly-box very usefull when I'm reading blogs.
It happend tha I've visisted a blog for the first time and end up reading 3,4 articles in the end.
So yes, the fly-box is very useful.
Its a very good post!! Much apreciated. However, we haven't discuss anything about the Ads on the page. I think we also should consider the adv ratio with the page content.
My thoughts on the Panda update: www.michaelcropper.co.uk/2012/02/ultimate-guide-to-the-google-panda-algorithm-821.html
what was the increase in rankings? the impressions increase? this could all be from returning visitors, which is not bad (in theory), but not a direct seo issue, per se
It's good to know about google panda update. Thanks.