Retail Search Engine Optimisation Techniques: Reducing bounce rates
Some advice to keep those hard won visitors
A large part of any on-page optimisation of a retail website is keeping visitors on the website once they have arrived. This stickiness of a website is measured by 'bounce rate' and can be tracked in many website analysis packages including Google's own Analytics package.
A bounce is defined by a visitor going into your website, staying for a short period of time and then going out of the website to another. The exact period of time that constitutes 'a short period of time' is debated in the SEO community, but it is thought that shorter than around 10 seconds could be constituted as a bounce as far as the algorithms used by Google are concerned. Website bounces are bad for several reasons and most importantly they do give you an indication that you are doing something wrong that needs to be addressed. Here are some ideas why a website user might bounce out of your website shortly after arriving:
- Usually websites get indexed and listed in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) according to the relevance to keywords in a search. Sometimes your website may appear for a completely irrelevant phrase in the search engines - website users who find this search result and reach your website for an irrelevant phrase will immediately leave again. This is probably the number one result of all bounces for users who actually make it to loading your webpage.
- If the landing page (i.e. the page that your visitors find from a search) is badly written, has little or no relevant content or is visually bad then your website visitor may click out again and go to another website.
- If the landing page is contextually wrong, even if it is on the right subject, then you may get a bounce. For instance, if your website appears in the SERPS for the phrase 'car turbocharger', there can be many reasons why a web user might search for this term. If the user is looking for general information on how a turbocharger works, and all your website offers is to sell a 'car turbocharger', then this is contextually wrong for that particular searcher.
- Badly taken photos and poor quality graphics can take their toll on website visitors, with an unnatractive website accounting for a fair proportion of website bounces.
- Badly laid out webpages, with poor navigation and lack of 'calls to action' can mean that visitors just don't find the information they require fast enough, leading to a bounce.
- Pages that contain large images, flash and huge amounts of unneccesary code can overwhelm some web connections, leading to a potential visitor to your website not even bothering for the page to load fully... if part of your page loads and the user leaves, this will still be counted as a bounce!
- User login systems which redirect to a different URL or sub domain can add considerably to bounces on large websites. On heavily trafficked websites offering a service, this can be a considerable problem.
So what can you do to reduce bounce rates?
Well the good news is that all of these potential problems are easily fixable with a little thought and work on your website structure. There are 'best practise' rules laid down which will help any website owner to avoid the worst bounce causing problems, and these are:
- Make sure that your website is optimised for only relevant keywords. It's no use optimising for keywords that have no relevance to the products that you have for sale, even if those keywords bring lots of traffic. Pay attention to the possible combinations of keywords that may be pulled out by the search engine algorithms, as ambiguity can add to bounce rate.
- Present well written, gramatically correct content with no spelling errors to your visitors, and make sure that the page content is relevant to the page title, metatags and links in the website to that page. Remember that every page on your website is potentially a landing page, so make sure each one is presentable and for an ecommerce website has a call to action which can point your website visitors towards your products.
- Present clear, well laid out navigation structures to your visitors. Make sure that contact details are easily found in many different formats on every page (i.e. in the header and footer of all pages). This step alone will maximise the amount of calls your business will potentially get from the website.
- Look at how your pages are laid out. There have been many studies over the years which tell us that the human eye scans a page in a particular type of way. The normal pattern for this is top-left first, then slightly down on the right, then half way down the page on the left and then bottom right. Utilising these areas (by placing contact graphics and interesting information) will lead to less bounces and more actual enquiries.
- Make sure all of your images are properly formatted for the web. You should look to have each one of your webpages be no more than 100Kb in size... inclusion of heavy amounts of Flash animation, un-optimised images and heavy amounts of scripting language will far exceed this sensible limit.
- Make sure that any login system which redirects to a sub-domain or another URL are blocked from search engine spiders so that they do not count towards your bounces.
Following these simple steps, you can ensure that your bounce rates will be minimal (sub 50% is acceptable for an e-commerce website)
