If your site is suffering from a high bounce rate it means that visitors are arriving, taking a quick glance at whatever page they have landed on and then leaving almost immediately, invariably unsatisfied.
But with an effective SEO strategy it is possible to minimise the number of potential customers who exhibit this behaviour and improve conversion rates accordingly.
There are a number of indicators that a site is not up to scratch, with a high bounce rate being one of them.
And it is important to remember that tackling this will only lead to improvements in the long term if you are willing to make an on-going commitment to keeping your site streamlined, relevant and in line with user expectations.
This latter point is particularly important, as it ultimately falls to individual users to determine whether or not your site is designed in a compelling manner and has engaging content or the right solutions to whatever their requirements might be.
The following are some things to think about in dealing with an unacceptably high bounce rate.
Bad SEO is the Culprit
One of the main reasons that a site is likely to experience a high bounce rate is that it is attracting the wrong kind of visitor. So in this instance bad SEO is not ineffective optimisation, but rather optimisation which is successful for the wrong reasons.
If you want to turn more browsers into buyers then you must target the right audience. The best way to achieve this is to ensure that both your organic and paid search campaigns are focused around keywords which accurately describe the services your site offers.
For e-commerce sites specialising in a particular category of products or catering to customers with specific interests, this can be relatively easy to address.
Sites that have a broader range of items on offer will need to tailor landing page optimisation in a way that engages with different audiences in an appropriate manner while ensuring that the underlying SEO allows these audiences to be reached in the first place.
Bad Design is to Blame
If your SEO is on point and the right visitors are landing on the right pages and yet you still experience a high bounce rate, then it is the site itself which is in need of attention.
And poor design choices can still be made – even by businesses which have been operating online for years, often as a result of imperceptible shifts in tastes and expectations.
There are a few red flags in site design which will immediately deter many of your visitors. These include pop-up advertising, surveys or mailing list capture screens which may be impeding access to essential underlying content.
In many cases these will also have an adverse impact on SEO, meaning that there are several compelling reasons to address these issues.
Pages must also be designed with the objective of making the user’s buying journey as efficient as possible. This requires an intuitive interface, together with an easy to use payment gateway so that there is a natural progression from arriving on the site through to learning about the product and ultimately committing to a purchase.
Finally, it is crucial for modern sites to be optimised for mobile use, both in order to satisfy the majority of browsers who now use smartphones and to ensure that search engine algorithms do not automatically penalise your site for failing to keep pace with the rest of the industry.
A Lack of Resources is Holding you Back
Ensuring that your site is optimised so that the right visitors are clicking through from SERPs, then presenting them with landing pages that make them more likely to “stick” and perhaps make a purchase, can be a time consuming and arduous task.
However, many sites may suffer from high bounce rates not because they are unaware of these issues, but rather because they know precisely what is wrong but lack the resources to address them.
Using the services of a specialist such as yoma.co.uk can help site owners to convert more browsers into buyers and avoid the exorbitant costs of a high bounce rate, thereby alleviating the pressure on in-house resources.
