How to increase your website’s usability, user goals, and SEO traffic using a single footer paragraph
One of the things the new Griffio website is lacking, outside of the all important content that is coming soon, is footer paragraphs. Footer paragraphs are a great way to increase your website’s usability, user goals, and traffic via SEO juice. Take this one for example that I use on a fan site I publish:
“Infendo is a gaming blog for gamers passionate about all things Nintendo. The site covers news, tips, cheats, rumors, speculation, reviews, culture, Wii, DS, GameCube, Game Boy Advance and a whole bunch more several times daily. Subscribe to our RSS feed, listen to Infendo Radio — the number one Nintendo podcast on the internet — or send us a tip! Infendo. Always informed.”
As you can see, the footer copy serves as a site summary and a call to action featured at the bottom of every page on the site. It’s keyword rich, it makes sense to humans, and encourages them to further interact with the site in a way we desire. Will your site see an explosion of traffic after implementing such an idea? Probably not. But it’s better than the alternative as analytics prove. White space and a bland copyright statement in your footer is a waste of space despite their clean looks. People like suggestions when reaching the end of content. Make sure you give it to them with well written, key word rich, and action-encouraging footer paragraphs. I promise you’ll see results, however small.
[Thanks, Nicholas]
4 Comments
One paragraph can be really good for your users, but it probably won’t impact your overall rankings very much.
However, I’d recommend something very similar to that paragraph (without links) hardcoded into Infendo’s meta description element.
That’s not going to improve your search engine rankings either, but since it’s often the source for the snippet shown in search engines it can help to improve your listing’s relevance and coherence.
Oh, one more note: the CTA in your paragraphs is excellent.
I thought it was taking longer to publish pages on Infendo .. just kidding. I think that’s a great idea and it’s pretty unobtrusive for customers.
You know what, I actually think this is a good call. I will give it a shot on a couple of sites.
Certainly couldn’t be considered as a black hat technique. Nice one!