The Quick Departure: How Bounce Rates Sabotage your Site
Considering the grueling hours you poured into building a website that works for you and represents your business in its best possible light (or the dollars you spent paying someone else to do it), the last thing you want to envision is a lack of interest among actual visitors. But it’s a thing, and it happens more often than not. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you have done it many times in the past—followed a link to a site and then simply moved on.
In the vernacular of web commerce, that’s called a “bounce.” Cute word, but it’s something we hope to avoid. And stat collectors measure the frequency of these in the form of bounce rates. The higher your bounce rate, the more you may want to take note, and figure out what you can do to retain first-time or regular visitors.
It goes without saying that ecommerce merchants are far more affected by bounce rates than conventional businesses who happen to have a web presence. Your business lives or dies by engagement and ordering. Here are ways to measure your bounce rates, and tips on how to reduce them.
The Big Fix
Figuring out why you fail to retain the interest of visitors is tricky. Sometimes they followed a link from ether cyber regions and discovered it doesn’t meet their needs. Fair enough. But consider the possibility that your page doesn’t present in an attractive manner, or that it contains usability issues. Is it confusing to new traffic? Are your ads attracting the right audience? Do your key words adequately reflect your offerings? This is where you need to get real about evaluating your current interface and consider having a remodel done.
First, does your content match the search terms that led users to your site? If not, it points to problems in your search engine optimization. There are ways to fix this. Here is a useful way to assess what’s on your page, from the web gurus at KunoCreative.
Try an experiment. Ask acquaintances or past customers to navigate to your site and report back on how it does or does not whet their whistle. Does it deliver what they expect to experience? Does it motivate them to explore beyond your main page? These are all useful questions.
Finally, as frustrating as it may be, some of this problem is fixed only with patience. SEO takes time to take hold, and you may wait a bit to see exciting engagement from your site. In the long run it will be worthwhile; in the short run, it hurts not a bit to do everything you can to speed up the process. Your livelihood depends on it.