One of the biggest ways that Google determines how high you are in the search engines is how long someone stays on your website.

Believe it or not, that is huge to them. That’s why there’s such a thing called “bounce rate,” people bouncing from your website. The funny thing is that bounce rate may not hurt your business at all.

Let’s say you have your phone number at the top of your website. So someone jumps on your web site, grabs your phone number, calls you, leaves your website.

To Google, that’s a bounce. But it’s not a bounce to you, because you just got someone calling you. However, Google likes people to stay on websites, and they rank websites higher when people stay on them longer.

So, here’s a little trick for you: create an interactive tool to get people to stay on your website longer.

For instance, on portbell.com we have SEO tools (www.portbell.com/seotools) so you can check to see how high your website is in search engines. You can also check for keywords, what your competition is doing, how fast your website loads, all sorts of different stuff.

Now, you don’t need a tool as sophisticated as that. But I have another trick for your too: Go to www.codecanyon.net and you’ll find lots of tools already premade for almost every industry. It’s amazing how many tools they have for $30, $50, maybe $100.

And you can get the basic tool then you can hire the person to customize it for you (quite often but not all the time).

you may be able to find a tool specific to your website that your customers are going to love, and it would keep them on your website longer. If they use your tool, you’re not going to get bounces.

Let me back up just a bit here. A bounce rate is when someone comes to your website and then leaves your website, either before a few seconds is up, or they leave without doing any sort of interaction with your website. They don’t click on any links, they don’t watch a video or anything like that.

Oh, and by the way, videos can be a good thing to keep people on your website longer as well. But interactive tools are doing even better these days.

So, an interactive tool will keep someone on your website a lot longer. Google’s going to see it, give it more importance and rank you higher in the search engines for keywords.

Think of what kind of an interactive tool would be good for your business. It took me a long time to figure out what kind of tool will be good for me. Back when I started doing SEO, there was no such thing as interactive tools. The only way to go and find out how high someone was in a search engine was to literally type the keywords into Google, Bing or Yahoo and see where they were and then write it down.

And compiling the list took hours. Now, I’ve got a tool that tells me everything. And it takes me about 10 seconds. Yeah, it takes a while for the app to run, but I just pop in and check the status every once in a while.

There are 20 or 30 different SEO tools on our website that you can use to find out about how your website is doing in the search engines.

And real estate agents have tools because they have listings. But not just listings, you could do things like a mortgage calculator. If you are an accountant, you could do tax calculators. If you’re an architect, maybe you could do calculators based on size of the house or something like that, I don’t know for sure.

But most industries have some sort of a tool that they could use. Check out codecanyon.net, but that’s just one option, there are others also. I use Code Canyon myself every once in a while, so that’s the one that I know the best. There are others out there. Type in Code Canyon in a search rather than just going to directly and you’ll find their competitors as well. But check that out.

Using interactive tools will help you get higher in Google, Bing, Yahoo, even Yandex. So it’s great for search engines, and your customers will love it.

This is Dr. Ty. I’ll talk to you next time.