cc: Please open door slowly by splorp.
Every website or blog has a purpose, be it a sale, a subscription or simply conveying the message, whatever it is. Achieving this goal is called conversion. The worst enemy of the conversion is the bounce rate. Most people who visit your website, unless you have perfectly targeted and optimized it leave before even reading it or taking a closer look.
You can’t convert users to buyers or subscribers if they bounce right away. So you need to lower the bounce rate as much as you can.
How do you measure the bounce rate? Using an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Woopra allows you to check the bounce rate. Any bounce rate below 50% is OK but most bounce rates are far higher. 80% is really bad but very common. Social media like Digg and Reddit even have 90 – 95% bounce rates. In case you have 80% of visitors bouncing you lose 80 users of of 100! Imagine a shop where 80 out of 100 people just open the door and leave instantly.
cc: Door to nowhere by jamelah.
Ironically most webmasters nowadays still obsess about rankings or PageRank instead of focusing on lowering the bounce rate and delivering the product, service or message to the people who already arrived at their site. It’s far easier to please those people than frantically look out for other visitors.
That’s why I introduce to you the 7 simplest ways to lower your bounce rate and get more conversions:
Depending on what kind of visitors you have or expect,
- casual social media visitors (CSMV) vaguely interested in your subject “I like blogging, let’s see what we have here”
- search visitors (SV) keen on finding exactly what they need to know, download, buy etc.
- returning visitors (RV) wanting to more of what you already offer, or deeper insights
you have to slightly adapt your bounce rate lowering tactics.
cc: Blue door – White wall by Klearchos Kapoutsis.
1. Place your offer above the fold
Offer what the people expect right on top even if you just link to it. For the casual social media visitors (CSMV) you need to emphasize the new aspect of your offering. The “simplest ways to” in the title might suffice. The search visitor (SV) needs to see the keyword right there “lower your bounce rate” in my case. The returning visitor (RV) has to see the additional value to what he already read on your blog. A gripping image as an eye catcher and a short teaser paragraph are also key for all visitors. For ecommerce sites the product and a call to action “buy here” button is key above the fold.
2. Do not distract
Do not distract your visitors from their purpose by offer several things at once (ads, products, plenty of links). Portal like sites have failed long ago but people still assume that you have to overload your pages. All three kinds of visitors expect the fulfillment of their wishes above the fold with no distraction. If they can’t see or find what they are after they’ll leave.
3. Be readable
Seeing just a huge junk of text without anything bold, italics or otherwise highlighted just makes me skim the text to find a clue whether I’m interested or not. In most cases, without those little clues i do not find anything and bounce. So add basic text decoration. For CSMV you can even ad an image with text in it.
4. Target specific topics
Don’t offer solely too broad low value information and be clear on what you offer. The most targeted search traffic comes from so called long tail queries that is very specific inquiries or when people enter 3, 4 or 5 keywords into the search box. So when writing for targeted blog posts or product pages focus not on the very broad term like “SEO tips” but also on the very specific ones.
5. Explain acronyms and industry terms
RTFM ASAP? Bounce rate? Conversions? Some people argue I should even explain “SEO” for my visitors, Acronyms and industry terms must be explained, even if my RV already know them. Some SV just look for an explanation. CSMV often do not know them but once you explain are drawn to the “new know how”.
6. Mind the eyes
The eyes of Internet users are strained most of the time. looking long hours at the screen is not healthy. Websites that offer no white space for eyes to rest are sometimes so annoying for the visitor’s eyes that s/he will leave just because of this.
7. Place search on top
Many people who don’t find what they seek in an instant resort to search. So those visitors, especially SV who do not find exactly what they want and who do not spot the search form will leave. If you’re after the conversion this also applies to the call to action.
This is more a primer than an advanced SEO post but I plan to write more about these issues. Also I’d recommend these fine blog posts elsewhere to read more about usability & findability, which are basically what I described above:
- Usability Post » Does Your Website Suffer From These 7 Usability Mistakes?
- 30 Ways to Increase Readability Online
- How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business | How-To | Smashing Magazine
- 33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic | SEOptimise
- 50 Ways Your Web Site Is Discouraging Conversions — and How to Fix It – Inside CRM
Related posts:
- 10 Usability Sins that Make me Bounce and Never Come Back
- What Does My Bounce Rate Really Mean?
- 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
- Spiritual Linkbuilding How to by Zen Master Seo-ing Singsun
- Quick Guide to StumbleUpon Categorization and Tagging
Need help? Consider a world class blog & SEO consultation by the author of SEO 2.0, Tad Chef. For full fledged SEO services like ongoing link building, contact my partners from SEO.com or look up my directory of SEO service providers and checkout reputable companies like Datadial or Redfly.
Already an SEO? Consider applying to be added to my exclusive SEO agency directory. Only selected companies get included. Find out whether you are eligible to submit your site.
This thing has 54 Comments
A nice big post talking about bounce rates is long overdue! I am getting pretty tired of webmasters who think that just SEO is the end-all be-all of internet marketing, and are way ove-conscious about page rank. Whether you are getting 10 visitors to your site in a month or 10,000, your site will still be unsuccessful if you are not creating a good user experience. A site that has less visitors, but a stronger bounce rate can be way more successful than one of the opposite.
Great tips on improving, and thanks for concentrating on this topic!
What a great topic that is not considered often enough. It’s a great list too. Normally I have something to add, but not this time. You hit them all. Congrats.
Really good suggestions. If you are going to use images to create visual appeal, please don’t make them huge and annoying. I almost became a bounce-rate statistic.
Yeah Mario, exactly. 10.000 visitors who bounce are not as good as 10 visitors who stay.
Barry: Thanks for the feedback! I’m sure you’ll find something to add sooner or later, especially some post from your blog. So feel free to add it later on.
Dean: LOL, you might be right. Usually I look for striking and pleasing images but this time I took an “intriguing” one due to the fact that it illustrates the issue so well.
You would think the information on this list would be obvious for most marketers, but it’s not.
It’s great that the industry has people like you to put together great articles like this one, Tad.
having a lower bounce rate is important and also a good indicator that your site is doing fine…plus a higher ROI can be expected with lower bounce rate..^^ anyways thank you so much for the wonderful tips.
Thanks for the post… i have tried several of these on some of my websites before… and i am launching one new travel portal soon… it will be very nice to see if i learned my conversion lessons ;)
Call to Actions is by best source of lead conversions. I like this post
I must admit my bounce rate is close to 80% for many sites. One thing I’m trying to improve is adding more cross links. I used to only add 1 or 2 links within my entries. I’m testing 10 per entry this week. Anyone else do this?
Thanks for the stats on bounce rates. I’ve looked around a lot for info about ‘acceptable’ bounce rates.
I usually have seen comments like ‘a bounce rate of higher than 40% means you’re doing something really wrong!’…
Does an ecommerce website without the secure socket layer affects the conversion rate?
Thanks for this article. Concerning Ads, I think you can let it on the page, but not inside an article, isn’t it ?
Tanner: Thanks for the feedback, indeed I’m amazed myself all too often about the ignorance of such an important factor like bounce rate.
PDAware: Portal? We’re not in 1999. Portals do not work. People want clean sites. That’s why Google is the #1 search engine not Yahoo or MSN.
Rethink: No call to action = no action. It’s that simple in many cases.
john: Internal links help for more page views but the are irrelevant for the bounce rate. The decision whether you bounce or not is not even really conscious it’s so fast.
Andy: It depends. For blogs it’s different than for ecommerce sites. The shops I optimized had 20% br.
Mercy: It lowers the number of conversions as people notice that it’s insecure and leave before buying. It does not change the br significantly though.
Ramenos: For the br any ads are bad. the more ads the higher bounce rate. Those who read the article can’t bounce anymore but they can leave (exit). Do not confuse the exit and the bounce rate.
We’ve recently modified our services to focus exactly on this subject – the performance of a wbesites organic, direct, referral and paid traffic. It’s worth the attention!
#4 is such an important point, I bounce immediately when i see a post that is sooo general with no specific ideas to present “just talking”.
BTW, You are on Fire Tad, great post every day, keep up the good work :-)
Hey, cool post.
I think I need to increase the white space on my site.
My site is very new, so I need to take heed of these advices :)
Cheers
Christopher: For paid traffic these tips are not enough. You need extra landing pages for paid traffic.
homaid: Exactly, if the headline just tells me it’s more of the same I read a thousand times I won’t stay. The fire made me write another post, but this time quite short.
Kris: It does not have to be white although white is best for the eyes. Btw. I have no clue what your site is about and no reason to stay there as of now judging from the first impression. I would bounce right off.
Some good pointers here cheers. When you say ‘white space’ do you literally mean ‘white’ or just a plain area of one colour?
Great post! It is very informative. Thanks for sharing the tips. They are very useful.
Nice post. Keeping each potential landing page on topic and of interest to the visitor is key. Naturally, the home page has the highest bounce rate, as it is the most popular and the most general. However, when you drill down to the subpages in a site, you can often have a bounce rate that is surprisingly low. The longer the search term, the more torgeted the traffic, and the lower your bounce rate it is.
The best method would be to keep everything minimalist, which is what your points #1, 2 and 3 says.
In line with this, for the first 11 months of my website, I did not place any ads, instead concentrating on attracting readers and converting them to subscribers. Most bloggers do not take such a conservative strategy, instead opting to monetize from day 1.
Great post! I admit that I have a very bad bounce rate on some of my sites….sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the process of trying to keep bringing more traffic in. But, in the long run, if you aren’t converting the traffic you ARE getting, you are really just making more work for yourself. Thanks for the tips!
I use google analytics and it says that people stay an average of 3:22, which I have been told is a long time for a blog, but my bounce rate is above %50 which I don’t find flattering.
I’ll have to look into implementing some of these tips to see if that changes.
I can agree that placing your offer at the top of the fold does help dramatically with conversion percentage.
I do ok with my smaller websites, but I’m growing a larger website and am looking at lowering my bounce rate. I’m building a list ok, but I need to work at site navigation. Perhaps I should have done a blog instead of a static page.
Great topic, not covered enough and I especially agree with #6!
Thanks for the great blog. I’m feeling pretty good about my sites bounce rate of under 30%!
I think visitors who fall on bounce rate might not be immediate buyers so for now they may not belong to conversion rate. This of course you could expect if you are confident you are not running any visitor boosting schemes that will eventually die out.
Hi, very true, I was able to lower my bounce rate to half just by changing font and some of the pictures, Also visitors hate white space.
I got new information about Google Analytics bouance rate…
According to G’s analytics I’ve got anywhere from a 4%-8% bounce rate on my site. I’m pretty proud of that. My readers love me. :) Of course, I get little or no stumble love from people or social media attention. So most of my readers are direct/organic google/or returning I guess my blog is too niche.
I’d also ad “Not putting too much info on one page” to that list. Maybe it’s just my reading style, but I hate when people write these long boring dissertations on a subject. It would be much easier to just break the 20000 word essays up into smaller chunks.
‘Fun size’ while not being great for candy bars is so the way to go to decrease bounce rate!
Nice to see people talking more about these things as opposed to just getting links.
I would have to add another for #3 and #6 and that would be to add in high contrast sections or menu bars so users peripheral vision is used as they scan the page looking for content, those help to quickly navigate the eyes to specific sections and can help greatly with helping them find what they want.
If a user can see how the links for example are organised especially for ecommerce sites it makes the site more user friendly and helps to reduce bounce rate, as you have said if they cannot find what they want quickly and there is no search then they’re gone and won’t come back.
Also breaking up the content into smaller chunks for example on a side menu makes it visually less straining, using the above for example using approximately 7 links or entries and grouping content into relevant chunks helps keep bounce rates lower.
Also on the high contrast and bounce rate radar is background and text colours.
I have found that you can easily gain a lower bounce rate by using white background and black text, seems obvious but still a lot of sites do not use this, ok we all like to be different but if it comes down to getting conversions then this is a must have in terms of achieving better goals.
great info I have a bounce rate of 80 percent so I will try to make some of these changes. thanks for sharing.
Its very important to have nice design and more exposure to your content, you did a deeplinking and thats why i landed here from one posts to another. nice idea.
great article dude.
Stumbled for nice article.
I agree with that being readable and using white space to ba easier on the eyes. People online like to scan things and you must present an attractive image for the eyes. I tend to cringe and not read media that doesn’t break up the text with paragraphs, sub-heads, images, etc.
I like that you share this information with us and this time it is something useful that can really help most marketers. You have introduced two interesting terms, I mean “bounce rate and conversions”.
The information given by you is very useful. Now I am thinking to re-structure my site according to your valuable tips described above. Thank you very much.
I feel you have explained your point quite well, I get an average of 200 visits per day, but also face 62% bounce rate. I think I’ll get my pages re-designed as well. Thanks.
Great post, thanks a lot.
We can say that bounce rate below 50 is ok. but there is no exact standard to determine the bounce rate. It may be different from site to site or page to page, I think above mentioned tips absolutely important and helped us.
Been trying to decrease bounce rate but to no avail. I appreciate your insights. I’ll let you know if it works for me after I make some changes to my home page.
Thanks again
It all boils down to content. You can have a crappy website with very good content and you can be assured that people will keep returning.
This article was extremely helpful to me as I was able to send it to a client in order for him to understand what SEO is actually about. Yes many times page rank is overstated and for some reason the clients are so focused on the keywords and their placement. The bottom line is results and we got his BR from 79% to 45%. Is aiming for %30 unreasonable?
Great article, thank you.
Currently my average bounce rate is 65%.I am trying hard to reduce it to 40%
Bounce rate is really a big issue. Currently my website home page bounce rate is 40-50% according to Google Analytics. Now I am trying to reduce it less than 30%.
This is really great post and I like it too much. Its true that website content should be readable, unique, quality and informative.
Thanks for sharing this helpful post.
I’d love to know the bounce rate of this page :-)
Currently my site’s bounce rate is 28%. I am afraid of it so searching for the solution and on the first get you. This article will help me lot. thanks
The biggest thing about bounce rate is having a site that is catchy to the niche you are tying to capture people dont realize that design is key.
You rock with this post. I am agree that bounce rate is so important and well known term if you are website owner or working on. It directly related to the number of visitors and the number of pages visits. Thanks a lot for your input.
I have personally found split testing landing pages is the only way to accurately test changes in bounce rates. Using the Google Optimiser we have in some cases managed to reduce bounce rates by up to 12%. It is a never ending process though as it is important to stive to continually decrease that bounce rate and increase conversions. Not for the faint hearted!
Any idea on how to decrease bounce rates on a directory??
Great post. Especially liked points 4 and 5 as they are definately overlooked on a lot of sites. Thanks
I was getting 72% bounce rate…so I was a bit afraid..cause google gives very much important to bounce rate…so thanks for the article…will put it on work…
Interesting. I am experiencying 100% bounce rate for my blog. I shall follow your tips and then let’s see what’s the difference comes out
Dr. Jawwad Saif: 100%? Impossible, than something must be broken on your site or in the analytics setup. I just took a look and it seems that you have only embedded your Google Analytics code on your homepage, not your actual postings. Thus a user can never perform more than one action on your blog that gets tracked.
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