How to Reduce Bounce Rates and Increase Conversion Rates

by Christina on Thursday 12th January, 2012 at 10:01 COMMENTS (0)

Do you often wonder how to keep visitors on your website longer once they have clicked through from a search result? Hopefully we can answer that question for you.

Everyone focuses on getting their website to the top of Google, often forgetting about the design, layout, content and the customers experience once they click through to a website.

When visitors find nothing of interest on a website, they leave, this is known as a bounce.

Reducing your websites bounce rate is the first step towards improving the performance of your website and increasing your conversion rate.

First you need to analyse the bounce rate of certain traffic sources, then improve the bounce rates of the highest converting traffic sources such as visitors coming from:

Search engine traffic
Email marketing campaigns
Affiliate campaigns

You can ignore bounce rates from unqualified sources such as:

Unknown referrer sites
Social networking sites
Random directory sites

Website Pages
Considering how you design your pages can really make a difference to your bounce rate, below are some helpful tips to help you reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversions.

Headlines: Make sure your heading matches or refers to the place where your visitor has just come from, or match the ad copy that drove the click.

Call to action: Provide a clear call to action and tell the visitor what you want them to do.

An example of a good call to action: "Only £99 per room per night at Buckingham Palace, London. Book Now"

A bad example being: "Cheap hotels in London. Choose from 300 hotels in London England.

The first example tells the visitor what they are going to get and how to get it, the second example gives the visitor too many choices.

Be clear and concise: Don't be vague or general, write clear, specific and targeted content aimed at your visitor. Your visitor is here for a specific reason, don't waste their time.

Hierarchy: Place the most important information at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets.

Keep it simple: Remove all distractions, links and where possible menus. Ask for only enough information to complete the desired action.

Testing
You only know if it works if you test it then test it some more. The purpose of testing your landing pages is to reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

As Google offers a free tool, we thought we would give a basic overview of setting up A/B split testing on Google Website Optimizer:

Create a campaign to test landing pages against each other.
Upload the URL of the original page that you're testing.
Upload the URLs of the other landing pages you want to test against the original.
Copy the JavaScript codes provided by Google and paste them in to the relevant pages you're trying to test.
Send at least 500 visitors to the primary URL and Google will separate those visitors randomly for you to test the performance of the pages in a non-biased way. You can do this by using AdWords, email campaigns or even affiliates to send traffic from specific keywords through the funnel.

Once you've tested several landing pages, try improving them by testing different versions of the best performing pages.

Real Gap went from a bounce rate of 25.44% to 18.24% after adding just a call to action. One simple change can make all the difference.

The Essex SEO Team