My news aggregation site receives a lot of traffic from Google, which is great of course. Most of the hits from Google comes from the long tail for various keywords and usually don’t hit the homepage or some of the main categories but some secondary pages. Unfortunately, lots of users from those hits don’t hang up on the site long enough. They find the article they want and proceed to the other site to read the article.

Although the user base of my regular visitors are growing, I wanted to tease even more new visitors to explore the site little bit more before they leave it. I have introduced a few tweaks on my secondary pages that shows up to the visitors referred by the Google search.

New window

The first thing I have tried is to put target=“_blank“ on all external links if the visitor is referred to the site from Google Search. Usually I let external links open in the same window, but if the user is referred from Google Search, I don’t want just to push the user on the other site and let him forget about my website. The user will at least see your site once more, when he returns to close the window/tab, but if you offer quality content and service, it might also explore your site.

Site introduction, link to homepage

I have offered visible color box with welcome message explaining my site’s niche. So perhaps the visitors just hit the page searching for some gossip, but I want to let him know that I offer great news aggregation on my home page and that he should visit my homepage to see it. I’m not afraid to make these box clearly visible and colored since it will be visible only to visitors that are coming from Google search, not to my regular visitors.

Using Google keywords to provide search on your own site

The last, and most efficient method I have used is to use keywords that visitor have searched for on Google and offer the visitor a search on my site for the same keywords. All this information are contained in the referrer url, you just have to extract them. So if the users searched for paris hilton and ended up on some page of your site, you can offer him to search all of your content for the keywords paris hilton.

If you have configured some AdWords campaign, you know that Google suggest you to use the keywords you have targeted in the title of your ad. Same principle works here, when the visitor sees the keywords he just typed, there is much more possibility that the visitor will click on the link. If you have any kind of search on your site/blog you can implement the same method.

Conclusion and results

Visits on my site are growing constantly and because of this I can’t measure the exact effects of these methods. Although the bounce rate is still the same or 1-2% reduced, the number of visitors in total is growing so I’m satisfied with the performance.

However, I do count the clicks on links that I have described in sections two and tree. These links record over 300 clicks daily. That might be 300 new potential regular users every day, and that is great.