Even the most effective SEO effort will be thwarted if you overlook this factor. You might well draw visitors to your site in the tens and even hundreds of thousands, but the crucial element is the number who stay and view more than one page when they arrive. In other words, have you made sure your site is “sticky”? If you haven’t, you’re going to see a lot of people “bounce” out of your site after viewing a single page.
Here’s how to reduce your site’s bounce rate.
Write Accurate Meta Descriptions
When your site comes up on the first page of search engine results, along with a few others, users generally skim the meta descriptions to see which site has the information for which they’re looking. If yours promises it’s the one and they don’t find it immediately upon arrival, shoppers will go back to the results to find someone’s site who does. Make sure your meta descriptions accurately reflect the content to which the links lead, or you’ll lose visitors right away.
Minimize Load Times
The average consensus is approximately two seconds. That’s all the time 47 percent of first time visitors are willing to afford your site to load a navigable page. This is even more critical in mobile computing. What’s more, if they do tolerate slow loading and shop there anyway, the frustration they accumulate along the way can lead them to abandon the shopping cart. The best free ecommerce websites, like the ones offered by Shopify, are optimized to load quickly.
Link The Proper Landing Page
When you run promotional campaigns to drive traffic to your site, provide a link to the page most relevant to the advertising. Expecting users to land on your home page and click through to the one associated with the marketing effort is setting yourself up to experience a high bounce rate. Message matching is crucial to keeping users engaged after you’ve drawn them in with an ad.
Feature One Clear Call To Action
Stacking more than one call to action (CTA) on a single landing page looks desperate and unprofessional at best—shady at worst. Have a solid idea of the action you want users to take and lead them directly to it. Furthermore, presenting more than one CTA on a landing page can be confusing to shoppers. Think about it; you’re asking them to scrutinize each one carefully to be sure it’s going to where they’re trying to be. Every landing page should have a single goal—lead the visitor to the information they’re seeking so they can feel duly informed and make a purchase.
Streamline Product Pages
Yes, the temptation to inform your customer about every aspect of the product is great. And, yes, the more information you provide, the less chance you have of experiencing costly returns. However, you have to strike a balance between too little information and too much. The key intel most shoppers seek are a well-photographed image of the item (from multiple angles if the product warrants it), along with a brief description of the merchandise, your return policy, customer testimonials and pricing.
Mastering these five tips will take you a long way toward reducing your site’s bounce rate. If you draw shoppers in with accurate information, optimize loading times for speed and take them to the appropriate landing page, they’ll stick around long enough to discover your well-defined calls to action and well thought out product pages. Get all of this right and you’ll see more conversions.
