First, to the readers of this business blog who follow my advice, you are welcome.
My slogan at TeachU™ is “Small Improvements Aggregate to BIG Results™”. Unless I’m working directly with you, you may not know what small improvements to make. This short post is to give you an important improvement that will yield BIG results. It’s easy. It’s free—or should be.
Look at the analytics of your website. If you don’t have analytics set up for your site, there is YOUR tip. GO SET UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS! Don’t use any other analytics. Hosting companies pad the results and so do SEO firms.
Okay, look at your Google analytics. Sort your site content by bounce rate. Ignore (for now) pages with low traffic. Look at pages getting traffic but have high (over 65%) bounce rates. A page with decent traffic and a higher than 65% bounce rate can be improved.
What is bounce rate and how do you fix it?
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who depart your site after coming in through that page. If a visitor searches, then follows a link which brings them into a page of your site other than the homepage, and then leave without looking at any other pages, that’s a bounce. That’s bad. It means they took the time to follow the link but when they got there you didn’t tell them what they were looking for.
BOUNCE is far more about CONTENT than LOOK.
If other pages, especially your home page has a low bounce rate (less than 55%), this page with the high bounce rate has lousy content.
To fix a high bounce rate you must re-write the content.
A high bounce rate means that either you are not supplying the information your visitors want or you are saying something that really turns them off.
Change the message.
Re-writing a page won’t take long. A simple copy/paste and the changes are posted. Make a note (I use Excel) of the page, date and current bounce rate. In a week or so compare the results. Did the re-write lower that pages bounce rate? If so, you have greatly increased your chances of turning a site visitor into a customer.
Improving your bounce rate is a tedious process. It will generally improve (hopefully) in rather small increments. Stay with it. Keep improving. This is a process guaranteed to produce more customers.
Tips:
Don’t bother with pages that have low traffic. That’s another issue completely. Those pages might need to be eliminated. Some pages, like “privacy” and “contact” will always have high bounce rates. There are people out there who are just looking for names to call.
A blog post with high traffic and a high bounce rate indicates a problem. If people find an article in your blog but do not care about your other pages, the blog failed to captivate them. Think about re-writing the post. But you should focus on site content first. Blog pages are tricky.
A page with very low ‘time on page’ and very high ‘bounce rate’ should be your priority target for immediate editing.
You can change the look later. If the content isn’t working, changing the look will not save your business.
Summary
Fixing the bounce rate of a couple pages on your website will improve your sales. It costs nothing because you should be able to edit text on your website without going through a webmaster. It’s worth your time. If you cannot do it yourself, ask your webmaster to show you how. Why? This process is never ending. Site content requires constant tuning. Sometimes just changing the headline will generate calls!
Well? Isn’t THAT worth your time?
Chris Reich, TeachU