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Is Your Bounce Rate Too High?

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What’s a bounce rate?

A high bounce rate represents lost business.Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who bounce. What’s a bounce? It’s a very simple but important concept. When someone arrives at your website, takes one look and leaves without visiting any other pages — that’s a bounce. At a recent symposium, one presenter summed it up like this: “They came, they puked, they left.”

If lots of visitors on your web site bounce away, you’re losing them as customers. Clearly, lots of bounces are visitors who weren’t really looking for you, but for something else. When they bounce, they don’t represent lost sales. But when a real prospective customer bounces, they’re going to do business with one of your competitors. And that’s never good.

How do I tell my bounce rate?

Many hosting companies provide site analytics that display your bounce rate. Failing that, install the free Google Analytics on your site, and you can track the progress of your bounce rate over time very easily.

If your bounce rate is too high, there are wasy to reduce it.

What’s a good bounce rate?

That may depend on your business. Retail websites typically experience about a 20-40% bounce rate. Well optimized content websites normally have a bounce rate in the 40-60% range. If your bounce rate is over 60%, you should be concerned. If it’s over 80%, you have a major problem.

Do you know how bad your bounce rate is?

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How do I improve it?

First, make sure your bounce rates aren’t because people are finding you by searching for stuff you’re not optimized for. If they find you by accident when they’re really looking for something else, those bounces are fine. But if people find you by searching important keywords, those are the bounces you want to improve.

Make sure it’s immediately obvious when someone lands on one of your pages by searching a relevant keyword phrase that the page makes it immediately clear that they’re in the right place. You have no more than 8 seconds to convince them your page is really all about what they searched for. Check your main above-the-fold headline and any other above-the-fold sub-headings.

Then make sure your web page isn’t turning them off. Check the copywriting and make sure you have appealing content. Mike Williams has written about common writing mistakes that contribute to a high bounce rate and which you need to avoid.

Make those changes and watch your bounce rate. If it doesn’t improve, look for other ways to keep people engaged on your site. Link to related content, use call to action links, and give your visitors what they’re looking for.

What’s been your bounce rate experience? Let us know in the comments below.

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Break It Up to Wake It Up

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Susana Fonticoba, owner of ClearPath Strategy, recently wrote an article about how to keep your reader’s attention when you have a long-ish document by breaking it up. She was referring to text documents, but her advice applies equally to web pages.

Susana FonticobaYou know you just love to read a really long document – pages and pages of similar looking text —  your eyes get tired after the first few paragraphs. And what do you say at this point? I’ll just read the rest later. But you never do because it’s a hideously boring looking document.

You don’t want people doing that to YOUR documents. Wake them up by breaking it up.

Use paragraph headings – that way people can jump to the section they need. That’s where styles come into play. Use the Heading styles to break up pages of text into smaller blocks of text they can find and read easily.

Paper documents and web pages share the same issues

How to Keep Your Reader’s Attention

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White space

So pay special attention to white space. Using headings and sub-headings as Susana suggests not only breaks up the monotony of body text, but it also adds some white space around your content.

Bullet Lists

Turn lengthy lists from paragraphs into bullet lists. That another way to add some white space and make your copy look a bit more approachable. Add emphasis via italics or bold where appropriate to break up the monotony. (Just don’t use underlines on the web unless what’s underlined is a link.)

Graphics

Use graphics. A nice image or two, whether photos or line drawings, with text wrapping around it goes a long way toward encouraging visitors to stick around and read more of your copy.

Conclusion

Growth of revenue from better online visibility via SEOGood SEO can drive lots of potential customers to your website, but it takes a good user experience on your website to convert them into actual customers.

[Update December, 2021] With the latest significant algorithm update from Google last summer, Page Experience is now an important ranking factor with Google. So paying attention to the user experience on your web pages not only helped with conversions but will help with search rankings as well.

Don’t ignore the user experience on your web pages.

Need help with what to say on your web page so it’ll show up in Google searches?  Call Rank Magic — we can help!

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Avoid Platitudes

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Don't bore your prospects to sleep with platitudes.Taglines are pretty ubiquitous, but often they’re unintentionally meaningless.  We recommend our clients avoid platitudes in their taglines because they often just make readers roll their eyes.

You need to avoid platitudes if you want to hook visitors on your website and convert them into paying customers.

A quick case in point

A company that provides marketing services to law firms recently blogged about a client:

I recently ran into a lawyer who was all excited about his firm’s new tagline. When he told me what it was, I asked, “What does that mean?”

He spent the next five minutes explaining what the new tagline meant to him. Apparently, the firm had hired a local advertising agency and spent a good deal of money to develop a “brand,” and this tagline was one of the components received…

I was concerned about the need for this attorney to spend all this time explaining his firm’s new tagline. An effective tagline conveys an obvious client benefit. If it needs explanation, it’s not going to work because prospects won’t get it.

 Avoid platitudes in your tagline

Is your tagline a meaningless platitude?

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Avoid platitudes

Certainly one thing a tagline should never be is incomprehensible. But a more common mistake is to use a tagline that’s a platitude. A friend who’s a marketing consultant said it best: If your reaction to a tagline is “Well, I should hope so”, you have a platitude: a throwaway line that just takes up space. A local moving company has a tagline of “the caring moving company”. Isn’t your reaction to that line, “well, I should hope so!”? That’s a platitude.

Effective taglines are difficult to craft. That’s why so many turned out by copywriters sound good but mean nothing. Here are some real-life examples we found on the web:

  • We provide free of charge estimates.
  • We provide quality service to our customers.
  • Experience…knowledge…quality.
  • We offer our clients on-time service, replacement and repairs done right the first time with courtesy, convenience, cleanliness, competence and character.
  • Our goal is to provide you with courteous, safe, comfortable and professional service
  • We Provide Quality Service!
  • We will provide courteous service to all customers …
  • Brakes and Brake Service – We do it right.. We do it complete!
  • We provide quality service through our well trained staffs … (grammar is another topic altogether)
  • We provide quality service and products on time, with no defects.
  • Caring and Knowledgeable Staff
  • We believe in doing it right the first time.
  • We give honest service at fair prices.

When there are lots of web sites out there offering similar products and services to yours, you can’t afford to waste web space on platitudes. You need to avoid platitudes and differentiate yourself from your competition. That’s how to capture the attention of your visitors. And that’s an essential first step toward converting them into paying customers.

Your thoughts? I’d love to see them in the Comments section below.

Need help with your search rankings? We get great RANKings in Google, almost like MAGIC. See what I did with our tagline there?

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Write Customer-Focused Copy

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Write customer-focused copy.Karon Thackston, an SEO copywriting expert, wrote a very helpful article in High Rankings Advisor about customer-focused copy. [Update: that website has been lost to antiquity.]

Customer-focused copy won’t help or hinder your rankings in the search engines, but SEO is not really, in the ultimate sense, about rankings. It’s about sales — selling your products or services.

Getting high rankings can bringing tons of visitors to your site, But that’s useless if the content on your site drives visitors away before you have a chance to sell them what you do or sell.

Customer-focused copy is all about conversions: engaging your visitors so they convert from visitors to customers, clients, or patients. Karon writes:

I am literally shocked that — after decades of marketing evangelists preaching “It’s not about you!” — website owners still don’t get it. What’s not to understand? Copy that focuses strictly on your company and practically or completely ignores your prospects doesn’t work nearly as well as copy that speaks to your target customers in their language and about the benefits they will receive.

Is your website focused on your customers?

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Karon provides a couple of revealing before-and-after examples and introduces us to a Customer Focus Calculator. This is a neat tool that will reveal how customer-focused (or YOU-focused) a page on your web site is, compared to how self-focused (or ME-focused) it is.

One of our clients has a site which I’ve advised him seems too ME-focused. I ran his home page through the Customer Focus Calculator and he got a score of 83% self-focused and 17% customer-focused. Then, with my fingers crossed for luck, I checked the Rank Magic blog. Whew! We scored 70% customer-focus and 30% self-focus.

Try it on your own web site.

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How to Write for Search Engines

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Copywriting - how to write for search engines

First principle: Don’t

Here’s an important principle at the core of good content writing for search engines. Always write for your target market  – people  – before you even think about search engines.

Keyword stuffing and awkward prose will drive visitors away from your website before they even consider doing business with you.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s get into some specifics.

How to write for search engines

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How to write for search engines

  1. It’s all about content. And that’s more than just the words on the page. Content includes headings, page titles, tags, and links (both to other material on your site and to external sites).
  2. A keyword-rich and compelling Page Title is essential.
  3. Use heading tags for your headings and sub-headings, and use your keywords in these headings.
  4. Focus. Keep to one topic per page. A page that’s all about lots of things is not really “all about” any of them.
  5. Use your keywords naturally in your body copy.
  6. Use keywords in the meta description tag, in link anchor text, and image file names & alternate text.
  7. Get to the point quickly.