Among the numberous search marketing related newsletters that I subscribe is one by John Alexander called SEO tip of the day. As it’s name implies, it’s a daily email with an SEO related tip (you can sign up for it here). I particularly liked today’s tip and thought that I’d share it with you. It relates to understanding your visitors activity on your website. John writes as follows:

…when you examine your Web activity reports…which pages are being viewed by themselves, where visitors aren’t even clicking to go to another page? Look at these pages carefully to see what you can provide on the page to keep up the interest of your visitors. You’re losing them, and you need to figure out why…are visitors confused and unable to find what they’re looking for?

In other words, if someone comes to your site and does NOT stay there is probably a good reason for it. It could be because your site is not what they are looking for, but there could be other reasons. Your site may be exactly what they are looking for, but it is not structured, organized, or presented in a way which let’s them know that fact! In other words, attracting qualified visitors to your site is only the first step in building a successful website. The second step is building your site in such a way as to convert those visitors to customers. And the first step in converting customers is designing your pages in such a way so that your visitors stay on your site. If your visitors are leaving your site then that indicates that there is something about your site which needs to be improved.