Fighting for the Second Click – Part 1

Understanding Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate can be simply defined as the percentage of website visitors that leave the website directly from the page they enter without clicking through to any other page of the website. This becomes even more painful when you really paid for that click leading to your landing page. Bounce Rate is one of the SEO key success factors and must be considered seriously as it speaks highly about the content and its likability by the audience. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

No more just the unique visitors and page views are so relevant…

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. Think about this from your customer’s perspective the action is I came, I saw, it SUCKS; so I am out of here

Let’s take a look at some of the factors that can be identified as possible causes of high bounce rate:

Traffic Source:

Low-value referrers, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous etc. will also be contributing to your bounce rates the most for various landing pages. People arriving through these sources are there to only satisfy their idle curiosity and are also mostly not from your target audience. However ensure these visits as they come at very low to no cost and have other value proposition attached; don’t worry if this traffic source has a sky-high bounce rate.

Links from other websites: Most links are nothing but the equivalent of a vague recommendation though in this case the visitor expressed some degree of intent to engage with your content but this is still to much lesser degree when compared to search engine query. Bounce rate in such cases would highly depend on the user experience.

Search engine traffic: This is where it really gets tricky, whether from organic SEO or paid links. By clicking your links as a result of search query users have indicated an acute interest in the topic and should ideally engage intensely with your content.

1. SEO Failure: The traffic coming from natural listing and leaving immediately is a sign that something is seriously wrong with your landing page. Take a fine look at the content to ensure that it enriches and adds value to visitors, its designed to please the eyes and is not cluttered with ads or other elements. Do away with pop-ups and ensure a clean interface and navigation.

2. SEM Failure: Your selection of Keyword is wrong, the query was a clear intent for which you paid to get user on your landing page and then there was nothing for the user to engage with. The content was totally irrelevant to the intent expressed which would lead to higher bounce rate and wastage of ad dollars spent.

3. Wrong Keyword Selection: What happens if you chose the wrong keywords? You spend a lot to invite irrelevant consumers. It’s like entering a shop selling dog food while you were really looking for wine. Technically it also means that you start optimizing your website for the non relevant keywords to get non targeted visitors who are looking for something different from what your website has to offer. This results into high bounce rate.

4. Ad Copy: Ad copies are extremely important as they represent your website in the paid search results. If this representation is not aligned to what your website has to offer it is definitely going to boost up your bounce rate.

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Anubhav Sharma