Search Engine Optimisation – Reducing the Bounce

Search engine optimisation When people think about search engine optimisation, they immediately start thinking about keywords and search engine rankings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you spend every waking hour worrying about that, you might be missing something more concerning; something that could be happening right now.

Every website owner should use Google Analytics. This small powerhouse of stats and graphs will show  you how your website is performing. Information such as which keywords bring you the most traffic, sources of your traffic, which pages get the most hits and the geographical spread of your visitors is all at your finger tips. But one of the key stats that will show how effective your website is, is the bounce rate.

What is bounce rate?

The bounce rate is a figure that shows the percentage of visitors to your website that leave within the first 10 seconds. And that’s not good. If visitors are leaving that soon it shows that they haven’t found what they were looking for. A site with a low bounce rate (say below 30%) will be a website that is converting its visitors into customers. A site with a bounce rate of 50% and higher is one that isn’t converting – it’s failing.

If your rate is 50% and above, its time to take a look at your SEO.

Factors affecting bounce rate

Traffic to your website comes from a number of different sources:

  • organic search results
  • backlinks from referal sites
  • repeat visitors
  • social bookmarking traffic
  • PPC traffic

The source with the lowest bounce rate should be your PPC traffic – if you use pay per click. If the highest rate comes from your organic traffic this would suggest that you have a mismatch with your keywords.

As a freelance copywriter it won’t come as any surprise that that is one of my keywords. So if people Google freelance copywriter they’ll find me. But what if I’d targeted something like marketing agency and they were looking for a company to deal with all their design and branding needs? When they land on my home page they’d find great information about my freelance copywriting services but no mention of design or branding. The result would be that they would click away from my site which would lead to a high bounce rate.

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Therefore it is essential you ensure your keyword selection truly reflects what you do. Shed loads of traffic is useless without conversions.

But it might not be just down to your keywords. Here are other factors that may be causing people to click away from you site:

  • too much advertising – this could be making your site look messy with too many messages
  • videos and music – especially if they are on auto play as soon as your website is opened. The can be really annoying
  • navigation choices – too many and your visitors will get confused, too few and they won’t know where to go next
  • slow loading speed – peopel don’t like hanging around waiting for websites to load
  • excessive corporate speak and jargon in your copy will be a huge turn off
  • bad design – if you site looks unattractive it won’t encourage people to stay

So, if you are experiencing high bounce rates take a look at your site and compare it with the list above. Take another look at your keywords – are they really reflecting what your site is about?

If you can bring down your bounce rate you’ll boost your conversations.

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3 comments ↓

#1 Nabeel | Create Your First Website on 07.12.10 at 10:23 am

Hi Sally,

I thought the bounce rate meant that how many people exit the site from the home page (or a single page), and do not go to any other page on the website.

from wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate :

“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.”

“Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site.”

and from google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986 :

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

And coincidently, a squeeze page (a one page website) would have a high bounce rate.

Please guide me regarding this, as I am a little confused. The reason I am asking this is because I have a very high bounce rate on my squeeze page, and I was not paying attention to it.

Kindest,
Nabeel

#2 admin on 07.12.10 at 5:09 pm

Hi Nabeel,

Yes, the bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your site immediately after landing on it (within 10 seconds). If your rate is low it means your pages are effective because people are reading them. If they are high, especially for squeeze pages, they are ineffective because they are either not what the reader was looking for, or they aren’t engaging enough for people to remain there and find out more.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the home page.

I hope that helps.

Sally

#3 Michael Soininen on 07.14.10 at 5:14 pm

True, excessive corporate speak and jargon can lead to readers tuning out and leaving your site – potentially never to return.

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