Fixing the Bounce

Bounce rates can cause all your careful SEO and ad campaigns to be worthless; if no-one sticks around on your site for more than a few seconds, traffic becomes meaningless.

Fortunately, a high bounce rate is fairly easy if time consuming to fix.

Website design often results in page layout, color and image choices based on the graphic designer or website owner’s vision—not what the customer needs to see.

You can use split testing and metrics to help you make educated guesses as to why people aren’t clicking on a button, or how they’re getting distracted from entering your sales funnel. If it’s not a major site based issue such as bad coding causing a page load problem, or a hosting problem on a server with a lot of downtime, you should be able to use inexpensive tools and metrics to help you decipher why your efforts are not yielding good results. From there you can fix and improve those high bounce rate pages.

The key is to figure out what is distracting the user or making them leave. What are the organic phrases used to find that page? If you are trying to target niche traffic related to your site, but then don’t address the actual search reasoning behind the term then you will end up with a high bounce rate.

This misleads your visitor, and makes the bounce away in disgust, realizing you have keyword stuffed to get them to click through top you and then letting them down. You must ensure that the traffic to the page is targeted, and that you are actually providing what they need. Users expect a search query for natural acne medication to take them to a page about natural acne medication, not a sales page for Accutane.

Once you feel assured that the traffic and content are in sync, look at the layout. If you can capture a .jpeg and run it through an online eye tracking simulation tool, you’ll get a map of the ‘hot spots’ – the places a typical eye will be attracted to when they view the page. Only capture above the fold to get an accurate read of what your visitor will look at first when your site loads.Use the results of your findings to determine where traffic is stalling, and create a more navigable funnel from site entry to the sales funnel. Your conversion path should be like bowling with bumpers up – easy for even a child to be led down the correct path.

By using these ideas to help you fix your bounce rate, you can increase conversions and make your visitors happier, as well as building a reputation for being a helpful presence on the web.

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