Deal with Website Bounce Rate
02/05/10 12:36 Filed in: SEO
This is a topic a lot of us will struggle to understand, so I'm going to try to use language that might at first glance appear condescending and for that I apologise in advance, I hope after you've read this article you'll appreciate why.
Bounce rate very simply, is the percentage of people who visit your website, take one look at the page they arrive on, and then very quickly decide to click the back bar. The higher the bounce rate, in percentage terms, the worse your website is. The lower your bounce rate is, the better you're doing at engaging with your website readers.
If that seems pretty straight forward we're ready to discuss exactly what to do to reduce bounce rate, and provide a better experience for your readers, and we hope, increase bookings, sales, or click throughs.
Google, not alone amongst the major search engines, tracks the number of people they send to your website, and how long they believe those readers spend reading your website. They have a number of ways of tracking this, some of it from placing a cookie on the readers computer, or from them looging into Gmail, or from the Google Analytics code you installed on your website.
The important thing to realise is that you can't easily fool the major search engines, they have hundreds of engineers whose job it is to give them the best information possible about your website and the people who read your website. When their analysis indicates people visit your website and 'bounce' they will automatically reduce your search engine ranking.
So, as a website owner, you should be striving to reduce bounce rate, and you do that by increasing page impressions. Unlike unique visitors that track each individual person who reads your website, page impressions track what each person does whilst they are reading your website, and in an ideal world you would want each reader to view at least two, but probably three of your website pages. That would mean your page impressions would increase relative to your site visitors, and the ratio between them would increase.
Determining page impressions (and bounce rate) is really easy if you use Google Analytics as your statistics package for your website, although there are oodles of other statistics programs you could use, including StatCounter, SiteTracker, Free Stats, to name just a few.
To really reduce bounce rate, and increase impressions you're going to need to monitor your stats over a long period of time, typically a month or more, and checking your stats every day, then deciding if modifications are needed is best. If you have employed a webdeveloper who also manages your Search Engine Optimisation, then this person should be managing your bounce rate as well, and should be able to give you a report detailing the changes they're making on a daily, weekly, or monthly rotation.
You'll notice that most good statistics packages allow you to see all traffic visiting your website, whether it is a direct visit (someone typing your website address into the browser address bar), a referral from a website that links to you, or from one of the main search engines. You need to take the time to look at each visitor to see how they found you, which page they read first, and if they click to read more of your pages.
Knowing how they found you is super important, perhaps they clicked a link on a friends website and then made a booking with you, or maybe they found you from a Google search page but didn't find what they were looking for and decided your webpage wasn't worth reading.
The page they enter your site on may not always be your homepage, in fact if you run a small B&B or holiday villa, they may very well find you because they are looking for activities to do in your area, that means they could enter your website on your 'local area' page. What are you doing to make sure that regardless of the page they read first, you are providing information that encourages them to then read another of your pages?
This means providing relevant links in each of your pages to other pages on your own website, so that you lead all your website readers from the page (and reason) they originally found you, to your sales page whether that is your booking form, your contact us page, or a page that provides a product they can buy from you.
To recap, your goal is to know your own website and your visitors so well that you can direct almost every visitor to another page, thus decreasing bounce rate and giving your site a boost in the search rankings, and by doing so, lead all visitors, even the visitors who may not be looking for your service, to a page where you have the opportunity to tell them about your product, activity, or service.
Bounce rate very simply, is the percentage of people who visit your website, take one look at the page they arrive on, and then very quickly decide to click the back bar. The higher the bounce rate, in percentage terms, the worse your website is. The lower your bounce rate is, the better you're doing at engaging with your website readers.
If that seems pretty straight forward we're ready to discuss exactly what to do to reduce bounce rate, and provide a better experience for your readers, and we hope, increase bookings, sales, or click throughs.
Google, not alone amongst the major search engines, tracks the number of people they send to your website, and how long they believe those readers spend reading your website. They have a number of ways of tracking this, some of it from placing a cookie on the readers computer, or from them looging into Gmail, or from the Google Analytics code you installed on your website.
The important thing to realise is that you can't easily fool the major search engines, they have hundreds of engineers whose job it is to give them the best information possible about your website and the people who read your website. When their analysis indicates people visit your website and 'bounce' they will automatically reduce your search engine ranking.
So, as a website owner, you should be striving to reduce bounce rate, and you do that by increasing page impressions. Unlike unique visitors that track each individual person who reads your website, page impressions track what each person does whilst they are reading your website, and in an ideal world you would want each reader to view at least two, but probably three of your website pages. That would mean your page impressions would increase relative to your site visitors, and the ratio between them would increase.
Determining page impressions (and bounce rate) is really easy if you use Google Analytics as your statistics package for your website, although there are oodles of other statistics programs you could use, including StatCounter, SiteTracker, Free Stats, to name just a few.
To really reduce bounce rate, and increase impressions you're going to need to monitor your stats over a long period of time, typically a month or more, and checking your stats every day, then deciding if modifications are needed is best. If you have employed a webdeveloper who also manages your Search Engine Optimisation, then this person should be managing your bounce rate as well, and should be able to give you a report detailing the changes they're making on a daily, weekly, or monthly rotation.
You'll notice that most good statistics packages allow you to see all traffic visiting your website, whether it is a direct visit (someone typing your website address into the browser address bar), a referral from a website that links to you, or from one of the main search engines. You need to take the time to look at each visitor to see how they found you, which page they read first, and if they click to read more of your pages.
Knowing how they found you is super important, perhaps they clicked a link on a friends website and then made a booking with you, or maybe they found you from a Google search page but didn't find what they were looking for and decided your webpage wasn't worth reading.
The page they enter your site on may not always be your homepage, in fact if you run a small B&B or holiday villa, they may very well find you because they are looking for activities to do in your area, that means they could enter your website on your 'local area' page. What are you doing to make sure that regardless of the page they read first, you are providing information that encourages them to then read another of your pages?
This means providing relevant links in each of your pages to other pages on your own website, so that you lead all your website readers from the page (and reason) they originally found you, to your sales page whether that is your booking form, your contact us page, or a page that provides a product they can buy from you.
To recap, your goal is to know your own website and your visitors so well that you can direct almost every visitor to another page, thus decreasing bounce rate and giving your site a boost in the search rankings, and by doing so, lead all visitors, even the visitors who may not be looking for your service, to a page where you have the opportunity to tell them about your product, activity, or service.