A lot of people have made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight in 2010. For website owners, you might have made a similar commitment to lose some undesired thing: your high bounce rate. To make this type of resolution come true, first you need to understand what causes a visitor to bounce from your website. Then you’ll be able to understand how some simple changes can keep people on your site and result in more online sales.
Why do Visitors Bounce?
Recently, while visiting my family in Canada I was looking for a specific Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat. I visited three sports apparel stores. The first two were similar. I spent only a few minutes in each store after finding out they didn’t have the hat I wanted. Then I found a sports store that sold only hats. I spent more time in this store browsing over the large selection of hats. But they didn’t have the style of hat I was looking for, and a similar style wasn’t available in my size. So I left.
We can compare this experience to searching online. If I was searching online for the baseball hat and I visited three sites similar to those stores, the first two sites would get a high bounce rate from my visit, and the third site would have a lower bounce rate but still not convert into a sale. I would “bounce” from each of the websites because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the same way I left each of the stores when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
How can you Reduce Your Bounce Rate?
If you consider my example of shopping for the baseball hat, each store could have reduced the chance of me “bouncing” from the store by expanding the inventory that they carried, or by not being listed on the mall directory as a store that would possibly have the hat I wanted. If we take these concepts and apply them to a website, you will get a similar affect with the bounce rate of the site. You can lower the bounce rate of your website if you:
- Provide more products or services relating to what was being searched for: Expand your product line to include all products available to sell that are relevant to the keywords your website is ranked for and make sure your products are easily found on your site. If you sell services you can break down your services into some that are more specialized. If I offer Internet marketing services, I could offer different focused services like organic SEO services or PPC management services that both relate to Internet marketing.
- Target the most relevant search terms: I have mentioned the importance of targeting relevant search terms in a couple other posts and I will mention it again. You might have a business selling tropical fish online but that doesn’t mean that “tropical fish” is going to be a good term to get your website ranked for. I could be searching for “tropical fish” because I want to take my kids to see tropical fish at an aquarium. If I found your site that sold tropical fish, I wouldn’t stay at your site for more than a second because it isn’t relevant to what I was searching for. Think of the most targeted terms that relate to your products or services and optimize for those terms.
- Incorporate a clean and user friendly site design: The bounce rate can be reduced by using easy navigation and a clean, appealing design. Make the products easy to find. Links to service or product pages should be clearly labeled. Include prominent links on your homepage to top selling products or most popular services. Check your products or services pages to see how easy it was to find them and make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks to find them.
If you have a New Year’s resolution to lower the bounce rate of your website in 2010, then these tips will help you to accomplish that goal. May 2010 bring you success in your online business ventures.
Being a Red Sox fan is much easier.
Joking aside, I’m a big fan of your three suggestions, with a little partiality to #3. Good advice.
Great tips. Thanks. Will be working on reducing my bounce rate over the next year. And maybe even my weight
good tips thanks for share
Hi, Thanks for the tips. Does listing in directories increase the bounce rate?
The search engines know the bounce rate of a website. When you make changes to your content, google will put your site up top to see what happens. If people click on your title from a certain key word and bounce right off, Google puts your site back where it was. If people who search that word stay a while and come back from the same IP address often (give them a reason to) Google notes this highly. Backlinks are still important, however Google doesn’t count as many as they used to. It has to be a bonified backlink from a high PR site and not just a listing on Ebay. The bounce rate is the most important factor a webmaster can worry about when designing a site. Not just to increase sales but to increase traffic which also increases sales.
I have never tried PPC to reduce bounce rate. However, that should actually work. Would it be best to target long tailed keywords?
On my SEO Blog, I don’t sell anything, it is all for free. So, PPC would cost me money out of my pocket. I’ll have to figure out what to sell.