The last thing you want to happen is for your visitor to click on the back button to go back to Google and continue his or her search. Chances are, if your visitor has decided to abandon your website, you have lost him or her forever. Don’t keep your hopes up too high. That person is most likely never coming back to your website again. Why? Let’s explore some of the reasons for website abandonment, and how you can reduce the frequency of this type of occurrence:
Irrelevant Content
The visitor typed in “how to grill chicken” in Google, but your website is dedicated to selling barbecue grills (on which you can grill chicken), then there is a strong possibility that the reader is going to just click on the back button to abandon your website, and either try out the next search result on the list, or type in a different search string into Google altogether. That is because the reader did not find your website to be relevant to what he or she was looking for in the first place.
So how do you remedy this situation? The answer is simple: Optimize the content of your Flash website for the keyword or the key phrases that you want Google to index your site for. In other words, if your website is about selling barbecue grills, then you need to ensure that you are using plenty of on-page as well as off-page search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure that your website is tightly woven to the key phrase “best barbecue grills” and not for “how to grill chicken”, for example.
Too Much Content
There are billions of free Flash website pages on the Internet competing for your attention. When someone is searching for a quick answer to a question or is searching for a product review, he or she expects to find the information quickly. People don’t have time to sit and read through paragraphs upon paragraphs of detailed text. They can lose interest very quickly and simply click on the back button to abandon your website and try their luck somewhere else online. The age of the Internet has ushered in the age of the short attention span. People don’t read web pages. They scan them. So you need to be able to provide more with less. You need to convey the information that the reader is seeking with less text.
So how can you create a Flash website and organize its content so as to hold the reader’s attention and prevent premature abandonment? One of the simplest ways is to use bulleted lists. Have you ever noticed that there are tons of websites out there with articles that start with titles such as “10 easy ways” or “5 simple rule” or “The 7 Things You Don’t Want To Do”? The reader expects to read clear and concise information. And if you can do that, then you just might be able to hold the reader’s interest long enough to get them to make it all the way to the bottom of the page, where you will have your “call to action” link.
Failing To Connect With The Reader
Failing to connect with the reader is one of the most common causes for website abandonment. You could take two websites that deal with the same medical condition, for example. But one website is purely academic in nature, offering encyclopedic definitions for everything, using highly technical jargon that is clearly not being expressed in layman’s terms. And the other uses all kinds of literary devices, such as anecdotes, analogies, stories, slang, testimonials, humor, evoking human emotions, using call to action phrases, speaking to the reader in a conversational tone, or writing from first person or second person perspective.
This is not to say that you should not ever use big words or that you should not use an academic tone of voice. The point is that you need to know your audience so that you can establish an emotional connection with the reader. You want the reader to be thinking to him or herself, “This is EXACTLY what I need” or “This is EXACTLY what I’m going through”. You want the reader to be able to relate to you.
Readers have choices. If they don’t find exactly what they are looking for on your Flash website, they will keep searching until they find it. It’s your job to make sure that the visitors who do come to your website find exactly what they were looking for.
