With any SEO campaign, it is important to measure the successfulness by regularly analysing the analytics data. When looking at your analytics data, you may see that your site is starting to get some good traffic and is attracting a lot of visitors, but if your bounce rate is high (i.e. over 50%) then you may need to re-think your on page strategy. A ‘bounce’ refers to when a user leaves a website from the landing page, and your bounce rate is the percentage of users that bounce. A good website would expect an average of around a 10-25% bounce rate.
If your bounce rate is high, you need to consider why people aren’t visiting other pages in your site. Perhaps it is because of a usability issue? If your navigation is complicated, or doesn’t display properly in different browsers, this may be preventing people from being able to view other pages in your site. A common issue is that the homepage contains too much information or is unattractive to the user. This can be addressed by creating call to actions, or obvious choices that the user can make based on their personal preference. For example, if you had an online clothes store, your starting links or choices could be clothes for men, clothes for women, clothes for children etc. This provides your users with a clear path they need to follow in order to help them find what they are looking for.
To help you reduce the bounce rate for your site, it may be worth thinking about the main reasons why users bounce. The top reasons, in no particular order, are:
- The page doesn’t load or render properly
- The page loads too slowly
- The user hasn’t found what they are looking for
- The user has found the information they were looking for
- The user is overfaced by the amount of content
- The user doesn’t trust the website
- Other usability issues
If your bounce rate is high, have a cold hard look at your homepage and top landing pages in your site. Alternatively, you should get an expert to analyse it - the results could be enlightening and profitable!
