How important is it to reduce your bounce rate?
In a previous post Bounce Rate Tip #2; I explained that bounce rate is one of the metrics that affect your conversions and should be checked regularly.
Today I will try to discuss how to reduce your bounce rate by analyzing and knowing both your referrals and traffic.
Your traffic is coming from three different places, either it’s coming from:
- Search engines
- Other websites are linking to you
- Not referred traffic by direct input, bookmarks, or newsletters and advertising…etc.
Note: I will not go deep into the not referred traffic within this article.
Search Engines Referrals:
Maybe search engines referrals are one of the most free of cost important part of your traffic. To reduce search engines bounce rate you need to do some optimization to your Meta tags; the title and description tags.
By this and while people are googling for something; your website popup on their face with the right title that explains the destination page with a small description on what will the user will find when clicking that link on the SERP.
The good optimizer will work for the user without offending the search engines, choosing the right keywords that people use and putting them in an understandable phrases will not only reduce your bounce rate but it will also increase your search engines ranking.
But, this will not work if the landing page has misleading, wrong elements or content such as:
- No search function at the top of your website
- Bad design which will affect your creditability
- Wrong usage of colors and font size
- Redirection to other website or page that doesn’t match what the user where searching for.
- Loading time more than 10 seconds.
- User’s can’t find what they were look for in 4 seconds.
- …etc.
So as you can see reducing the bounce rate for search engines referrals is a very simple procedure based on knowing your users and giving them what they are looking for.
Other Websites Referrals:
You should always work on this part as it has an incredible effect on your search engine ranking. The more people links to you the more ranking improvement you will get, especially if they are linking to you using your own keywords.
Do a fast research on top search engines and check who is linking to you, you can do that manually by using the below table which exist on Google webmasters tools:
| Operator | Description | Result |
| site: | Indexed pages in your site | site:www.anjoukeh.com |
| link: | Pages that link to your site’s front page | link:www.anjoukeh.com |
| cache: | The current cache of your site | cache:www.anjoukeh.com |
| info: | Information we have about your site | info:www.anjoukeh.com |
| related: | Pages that are similar to your site | related:www.anjoukeh.com |
Or you can use the SearchStatus for Firefox and Mozilla.
The idea is to know who is linking to you and check the bounce rate for those backward links. You will be amazed when checking the results.
Categorize these links and see which is better category have less bounce rate and work to increase this kind of linking either by direct submitting or by contacting webmasters to let you included in their websites and blogs (we are not talking about reciprocal links here).
This process might take sometime to be done, but it worth it, and will also show how people are positioning and classifying your website or what are they saying about you.
Not Referred Referrals:
Usually this is the big piece of the pie, part of this traffic is because of bookmarks, people found your website worth to keep on their del.icio.us or their favorites. Very interesting and important to keep giving these people the same level of service they used to. Other part is for people who memorized your domain and this is much better (they need more attention).
- Rest of the list:
- Word of mouth
- From your business card
- Offline advertising
- Online campaigns
- Newsletters and mail shots
Optimizing this part is difficult somehow and need real teamwork within the organization and the different departments.
Conclusion:
Optimizing your messages through your marketing strategy is very important to reduce your bounce rate and that include you Meta tags, links from other websites, directories, and blogs.
Now you have the knowledge needed to reduce your bounce rate which eventually will increase your conversion ratio.