The SBI Mall

Wow, is that an outrageously bold claim or what?

But allow me to explain. Let’s start with…

Sentence one and two

In order to understand what I am on about, let’s go back into the mind of the person who searches for one of your keywords in Google. What do you think this guy (or gal) is thinking?

Umm… let’s see, does this site have this info, does this site have this info, does this site, this site, this, this, this…

Yup? That’s what we all do when we search, right?

And what that person is actually doing is scanning the titles, the descriptions, and perhaps the URLs displayed in the search engine listings… looking for an answer to the question…

Does this site have what I want?

It’s the job of your title tag and the meta description tag to answer that question.

It’s not enough to provide an accurate description of the page here.

You must first get into the head of that person and find out what they are looking for when they type that keyword in Google.

When someone types “Goa vacation” into Google, they probably want to decide if a vacation in Goa is right for them, and what it would be like to have a vacation in Goa.

When someone types “Goa vacations” (plural) into Google, they are probably looking for vacation packages for Goa. It’s very likely that they have already decided that they want to have a vacation in Goa this summer. (Or winter. It’s always summer in Goa.)

Stop! Did you notice that?

The person searching for “Goa vacation” is looking for something completely different from the person searching for “Goa vacations.”

If we want the person searching for one of these two terms (or ANY term for that matter) to click on OUR link in the search engine results page, we want the title of the page and the site’s description to tell them that THIS PAGE HERE is where they will get what they are looking for.

So take a few minutes to think about what the searcher is really looking for when he/she types that keyword in Google, and try to make the content of your title tag and your meta description tag to really appeal to him/her.

The more appealing your title and description are, the more clicks you will get, and hence more traffic.

So that explains the first and second sentences.

If you want, you can just rework the title tag, but why not rework the meta description tag too, while you are at it?

Anyway, moving on to…

Sentence three

Now the visitor is on your page.

Something very important just happened. By clicking on the link to your site in the SERP, the visitor completed phase one of his search.

And their arrival on your site marks the beginning of phase two.

Their mindset is completely changed now. They are looking for the answer to a totally different question:

Do I want to stay on this site and read the rest of this page?

And they give you precious few seconds to prove to them that your site/page is indeed worth their while.

If they don’t think they should stay, they just “bounce.”

Ouch!

And how do they decide?

Several things, I would reckon, but the two most important are (in my experience and opinion):

1. Can they easily locate the page’s headline and determine if the page is relevant to what they are looking for?
2. What does the headline say?

The first one is a design issue, and the best thing you can do regarding this is to reduce clutter from your page. KISS. It also helps to make the headline stand out clearly from the rest of the page using font size, color, and white space around it.

The second issue is much easier to tackle, and my dear friend, I love you for making it all the way till here only to realize that I am telling you to change your page’s headline, and still not getting mad at me for stating the obvious.

Wait a minute captain obvious! If you knew that already, why haven’t you done it? Why is your headline the same as your title tag?

I will be the first to admit that I have been lazy myself and I have several pages where the headline of the page is the same as the title tag. Goodness knows how much money I am losing because of this.

Let’s admit it, the people who come to your site and “bounce” immediately, contribute nothing to your site except inflating the traffic stats. What you want is people who stay. People who are a part of the “monetizable traffic.”

And if you reduce your bounce rate by encouraging more people to stay on your site, you effectively increase your traffic – at least the kind that matters – monetizable traffic.

To really help understand this, let’s use an example. And this is of course, just a made-up example, and your mileage will vary.

Suppose you get 100 visitors per day to a particular page that has a bounce rate of 70%. This means that 70 out of these 100 people click the back button within 30 seconds of arriving at your site.

So your monetizable traffic is 30/day. And as we said, this is the only kind of traffic that matters, really.

But suppose after reworking your headline to make it more compelling, you encourage more readers to stay on your page. Suppose you bring down the bounce rate to 40%. This means only 40 people now leave your site within 30 seconds of arriving. The other 60 people stay back to read your content.

Which means that your monetizable traffic now becomes 60/day.

Double!

Wait a second! All you did was change just one sentence!

Do you see the power of the headline now?

The power of compounding

I realize that the exact effect on your site will be different, but consider this:

By changing the title tag and meta description tag of the page, you increase the traffic that your page gets.

By changing the headline to make it more compelling, you increase the percentage of people who arrive at your site and stay on to read your page.

Which means you increase your monetizable traffic a lot.

To illustrate this using an example, suppose your page used to get 100 visitors per day, out of which 70 people left (70% bounce rate), leaving 30 people per day who can be monetized.

But suppose after improving your title tag and meta description tag, more people click on your site’s link in the SERP. Say 150. And this is totally possible, though of course, your mileage may vary.

And also suppose you improved your headline a lot, and reduced your bounce rate from 70% to 40%. Again, this is well within your reach, because remember all you need to do is convince the visitor that they would like to read further.

Which means that 60% of your traffic is monetizable.

60% of 150 is 90. Which is three times your previous monetizable traffic!

When you increase your monetizable traffic by three times, you are actually tripling your income! Because hey, 100% of your income is from the monetizable traffic that you get, not from people who bounce back.

But even if you can’t triple your monetizable traffic, you can still increase it significantly. And your income will grow in direct proportion to your monetizable traffic.

And you get all that just by changing your title tag and meta description tag, and the page’s headline.

Action steps

For the title tag and meta description tag, start with the pages that get a lot of high rankings, but not much traffic.

For the page heading, start with pages that get a lot of traffic, but have a high bounce rate.

Then work your way downwards through the rest of the pages.

Would it worth a few minutes per page to potentially double or triple your income? What do you think?

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