Tag: website

How to reduce your website’s bounce rate

Posted on by Comunicació

Reducing the bounce rate for your website or blog is a key factor in improving its health. The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors to the site who then leave without visiting more pages or engaging with it. There may be various reasons for this, including technical issues, UX issues, poor content or a poor content structure etc.

Calculating a bounce rate is easy and is done with website statistics tools such as Google Analytics or Matomo. However, it’s important to bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a good or bad bounce rate, as it depends on what type of site is being measured. For instance, a landing page or a final content page can have a high bounce rate, but this is not necessarily a bad thing if the page requires no additional engagement.

The following tips can help reduce the bounce rate for a website or blog:

  • Check the speed of the website and optimise its images, as a slow-loading page can turn visitors away before they engage with the content.
  • Improve the structure of content and the user experience: make the content more interesting and relevant, improve the accessibility of the site through responsive design,enabling users to view it from their mobile or tablet.
  • Guarantee the security of the website, through an SSL security certificate or by including legal texts (privacy policy, legal notice, cookie notice and contractual conditions where applicable).
  • Including internal links on pages can be a good way of reducing the bounce rate for your website or blog. This way users will engage with the different sections, pushing up the time spent on the website.

In summary, it’s important to keep an eye on the bounce rate for your website or blog, as this is an indicator of its health and will help you understand what changes you can make to improve user experience.

How to choose keywords to promote your website

Posted on by Comunicació

When it comes to promoting your website on the internet and getting results from your campaigns on Google Ads, a publicity service which among other things allows you to appear in the best positions in Google search results, it’s important to choose your keywords well, just as you do when you work on the SEO for your website to get well-positioned by Google.

When choosing keywords to activate your ads, you should bear in mind which words your potential customers might use when carrying out a search in Google. Take into account that your ad will appear in the search when the keyword you’ve chosen for your campaign coincides with the word typed in by the person looking for your products and services.

The recommendation is to choose between 5 and 20 keywords. To choose these, you need to analyse the business services and products you’re offering and how you would look for them with Google. Think about the words and phrases which best describe each of the categories which your business embodies.

If, for instance, you have a cafeteria, you might like to think of terms such as “cafeteria” and build on this to add things like “best breakfast”, “where to have a coffee”, “cafeteria Sants” (or the neighbourhood your business is in.

The more specific, the better

Think of words to connect with a specific user, this way you can reach a customer who is interested in a very specific product. You can run specific ads with keywords such as “best croissant in Barcelona”, “best sourdough bread” or “vegan cakes”, for people specifically looking for this product.

Create different groups of ads according to keywords

For ads to become relevant and reach customers with an interest in your products and services, it’s a good idea to group together keywords to match the different areas or categories of your business.

If you add a keyword in the same group of ads, a customer looking for “vegan cakes” might see your “cafeteria in Sants” ad when this might not really fit in with what they’re searching for. The best way is to group ads together by topic, thinking how they might be replaced or be of interest to a customer searching for one of the keywords or phrases in the same group of ads.

Don’t forget negative words

You probably won’t want your ads to display to people looking for a product or service which is not linked to your business. Because of this, you can add negative keywords to your list. This will stop your ads from appearing in searches which are of no interest to you and is a good way of cutting costs. To mark negative keywords you need to put the symbol – in front of the word in question.

Bear in mind concordance for Google Ads

Google Ads doesn’t simply take into account the keyword you add to your list. The words you add do not always correspond to those which users type in for their searches.

• Broad concordance: this is the default option. It allows an ad to display when search words and phrases are similar to those you added as keywords. This includes relevant variations and synonyms of your keywords.

• Exact match: this option only allows ads to display when the user’s search includes the word or phrase you established as a keyword. To choose this option you simply need to put the word or phrase between inverted commas.

For instance, if you choose “cafeteria Sants” as a keyword, when somebody looks for “cafeteria Badalona” or “haberdashery Sants” it’s unlikely that your ad will appear on the search results page. Yet if you put the keyword “cafeteria Sants”, it will only appear when the search includes the phrase “cafeteria Sants”.

“Barcelona has got an international reputation in the world of graphic design, which we wanted to link to our website”

Posted on by Comunicació

Minsk is a graphic design studio which started life eight years ago. The studio has evolved over time, its members have recycled their knowledge, and little by little Minsk has become specialised in audio-visual projects using video, animated graphics and digital design. With the creation of the domain minsk.barcelona the studio has been able to link its website with its values and those of its clients. We spoke to Pere Gómez Gavaldà, a member of Minsk, about design and the .barcelona domain.

What sets you aside from other graphic design and audio-visual studios?

Even though we’re a small studio (there are five of us), the thing that specifically sets us aside is that we are multi-disciplinary and flexible, meaning we can take on all types of projects with the advantages of working with a small studio, offering personalised service and dealing with clients directly.

How important is it for a company in the graphic design sector to have a website?

In our case it’s essential, as precisely one of the services we offer is the design and layout of websites, so we need a website which meets the expectations of what we offer our clients.

Of course, it also acts as a showcase where we can publish our outstanding projects and create our own discourse (you can get the idea if you read the texts on the website). That said, and as people know, when you get on with things your own website sometimes ends up at the back of the queue, and admittedly we often don’t have the site as up-to-date as we’d like to.

How do clients relate to you when they discover you through your website? What differences are there when dealing with them personally?

In our case the website tends to be a tool we direct clients towards when they want to see examples of what we do, as the site features some of our most notable projects. We’ve also got clients who contact us for the first time because they’ve found our website (the truth is that without being experts in SEO, we’ve got it well positioned), and with these clients the advantage is that they’ve actually seen what we do and they’ve actively contacted us, meaning part of the work is already done.

Even so, personal treatment for a small studio like ours gives added value, and once we get a mail from a client who contacts us via the website we try to get together or call them to be able to speak to them directly, as that’s what enables us to work in a more agile and personalised way.

Why did you choose a .barcelona domain?

One of the main reasons for changing the domain is that although the .es domain is shorter, we felt that as a brand we preferred the idea of linking our company to Barcelona, which ultimately is our city and has an international reputation we wanted to link to our company.

What differences did you notice in the everyday activity of the company after launching the website minsk.barcelona?

Most of all, the fact of linking the brand to new values which are much closer to us, our values and those of our clients. It mainly helped us to avoid misunderstandings. We opted for a change in strategy and communications, leaving behind Minsk Disseny (our commercial name up until that point) and becoming Minsk.barcelona. On the one hand, because design is now just a small part of our work, and on the other, because we wanted to link our main name (Minsk, the capital of Belorussia and the imaginary world we associated our brand with) to Barcelona (our real city, with values which we sincerely identify with much more at present).

As a graphic design company, what do you get out of linking yourselves with the city of Barcelona?

A lot. Barcelona has long been associated with design in general (not just graphic). It was important for us to be able to link these ideas. In addition, the contraposition between Minsk and Barcelona also helped us create a friendly word combination which has been useful for playing with the dissociation we usually use as a communication value in our branding.

How much clout does the name of Barcelona have in the world of graphic design and audio-visuals?

A lot. I think on an international level people continue to see Barcelona as the national leader when it comes to design. The same applies with audio-visuals, although here it’s more spread out.

Domain, website and email: how they are similar and how they differ

Posted on by Comunicació

When we talk about the internet there are some related concepts which can cause confusion between them. While plenty of people know what a domain is, some might not realise that registering one does not give you a website. People may also confuse a URL address with an email address.

What is a domain?

A domain name is simply the name we choose for our website. Technically, it is a ‘translation’ using words that are easy to remember and which correspond to an IP address where all the information on our website is hosted. This IP address is a very long unique number, which we essentially substitute with the domain name. Consequently, the domain name must also be the only one of its kind in the world. An example of a domain would be mercat.barcelona.

Does registering a domain mean we have a website?

No. If we register a domain, we have only registered what we want to call ourselves on the network (domain name). If we want a website, we must rent space where it will be housed. To do this we need to acquire space on the server where we will save all the files that make up our website. We do this through a web hosting company.

So, what is the difference between a domain and a website?

The domain is the name we write in the browser, while the website is the page itself. In other words, all the information it contains: files, texts and images.

And email?

An email address is the address we use to send and receive emails, from a webmail or an email management programme such as Outlook. This service is provided from an email server. The email address very often includes the domain name, as most web servers offer the option of registering email addresses too. This way we can manage everything from the same domain management panel.

An email address differs from a website address as it has the symbol @ in the middle. This separates the name of the recipient from the email domain. For instance, if our domain is mercat.barcelona, the email address could be info@mercat.barcelona. We can register as many email addresses as we wish or as many as our server allows.