Redirecting URLs, Good or Bad Practice?

Recently, a number of websites was reviewed to establish what many site owners do wrong when it comes to optimizing their websites. Thus, this webinar series was broken down into many parts; each part representing an individual website and the issues that were highlighted, plus probable solutions to optimize conversion by carrying out a series of tests on different elements of each site’s pages.

On this review, which is a part of the webinar series by A/B testing software” href=”https://www.convert.com/” target=”_blank”>Convert and Creative Thirst‘s Bobby Hewitt, they review a website with redirecting URLs, and whether or not it can be beneficial for your website or not. For the complete presentation, you can watch the webinar here. The review focuses mainly on a website called eComparo, one that compares loans or credit card rates.

Get Your CTAs Right

To start with, the site includes a subscription option that’s wrong in a regard similar to the many others reviewed: a poor Call-to-Action. It doesn’t do a good job in trying to answer why someone interested in this service should go ahead and subscribe in the first place.

[Tweet “Call-to-Action Tip: Buttons get 200% more click through rates than text”]

While simultaneously communicating value, your CTA should urge your subscribers to do the following:

• Make a purchase
• Register for a webinar
• Request information
• Visit a website

Things To Avoid When Redirecting URLs

The site also has comparisons of different rates, which upon clicking, leads you to a totally different site. What this does is force the user to go through the thought process all over again as they try to reorient themselves with what the new site is all about, assuming they decide to stay there a minute longer that is. You may have seen such websites and you yourself are not too sure how many people appreciate this kind of thing. You visit a certain website that throws you on a different new link altogether without your consent, simply because you clicked on one of the elements on the page.

It seems to be a very clever, very sneaky, way that the owners of eComparo are doing to lead one into believing that the new site is a lead generation site or rather some sort of affiliate site. So, what does the link you’re redirected to have to offer? It has some banners on the top of the page and just beneath there is a button that says ‘See Offer’. The actual offer doesn’t offer much but take you back to the same place as the banners. What they are doing is in order to increase their banner click, their rate, they’re adding a button underneath that says see offer, which is really rather clever and sneaky.

Now, how is this bad for their website? This kind of tactic greatly affects their SEO as it squanders the PageRank that their site has acquired. According to Chris Hartwell’s 3 Bad Redirect Practices That Can Hurt Your SEO,

As much as you can, you should redirect pages to similar pages or pages that can match content relevance as closely as possible

After visiting a website and finding this kind of trickery, do you bother to even go back to that site again? Absolutely not. If you want to find out more of if you want to see the complete presentation, you can watch the full webinar here.