8 simple ways to lower your Bounce Rate

1. Use a nice Web Design / Layout
The design of your website is one of the most important factors. Try using eye friendly colors, avoid animations that popup in the middle of the page and anything that could distract or make the visitor feel uncomfortable. Organized content without information overflow in one page can deliver your message to the visitors effectively. Avoid using template sites and have the layout designed by a professional. Make sure that the HTML of your website is valid in order to have the same result in all the browsers. Use our HTML Validator to check your site.

2. Keep the size of your pages low
Make sure you have optimized the size of your images, keep the text/html code ratio low and try your best to keep the loading time as low as possible as it affects the user’s experience.

3. Build a user friendly Navigation (Menu)
The hyperlinks are the power of the web. Your site needs to have a user friendly menu that will allow the visitor to find what he wants easily. Avoid placing the menu on the bottom, try to organize the pages into categories and do not bury the important pages more than 3 clicks away from the homepage. Suggesting relevant products or services and placing links in strategic place in the text is something worth doing. Try using text links that contain keywords and avoid flash menus.

4. Create well written texts
Check that the title, the headers and the metatags of each page are relevant with the context. Have an abstract in the first paragraph or try to answer all the visitor’s questions in the first lines of your page. Use our Keyword Analyzer to test their relevance. You can find more in the article “5 basic rules of SEO copywriting“.

5. Optimize for the correct keywords
When it comes to SEO, always optimize the pages for relevant keywords. Each page should target to 1 or 2 terms. Make sure they have a good keyword density and that they appear in the important parts of the document such as the titles and headers. Do not try to trick the users and Google by including unrelated or too generic keywords. Even if you manage to rank first, the users will leave right away and you will increase the Bounce Rate. Use our Keyword Analyzer to check the keywords of your site.

6. Get Quality Links
Try to get some good links pointing to your page. Make sure they contain the correct anchor text. You can lure other webmasters to link to your pages by placing good content in your pages (interesting texts, a free service, start a clever marketing campaign etc). Try to avoid link exchange as in most of the cases one of the 2 linkers loses more PageRank. Use our Site Submitter to bring more links to your site.

7. Start a PPC Campaign on the most important keywords
Consider starting a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign on the important keywords of your site. Make sure you will pay a reasonable price per click and select the ones that are relevant to you content. Pay attention to the bidding management of your PPC campaign. Bid for the right keywords in order to avoid wrong traffic.

8. Study the reports
As a webmaster, when you evaluate how successful the online marketing campaign was, you should not only take into account the amount of traffic, the PageRank or the page views of your site but also focus on the Bounce Rate, the Average Time on Site, the Pages/Visit and the Conversion Rates. Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, define your goals, study the reports, categorize your visitors based on their behavior and redesign your SEO plan when needed.
Here are some simple thinks to have in mind:
• The user must find what he searches for. Averagely you have about 8 seconds before he leaves the page.
• The content (titles, headers, texts) of your page should be clear and easy to read.
• Get to the point and do not distract the user with popups, huge ad banners, tones of links etc.
• Give him the option to search or suggest him something relative pages.

Business benefits of SEO

Search Engine Marketing helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness.

There is more to search engine optimisation than just marketing, as companies can derive many business benefits from using SEO. Let’s take a look at a few...

• Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
  There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume, low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (eg ‘car insurance’).
  It can also be useful for generating visitors on the long tail of search. Many companies bid on these phrases through paid-search, so giving opportunities for those who use an SEO strategy for the tail.
  
• Fixed Costs
  The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimisation costs and lower ongoing optimisation costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.
  
• Brand Visibility
  Think about that search on ‘car insurance’. The big insurance companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it either need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.
  
• Focus on Web Standards / Accessibility
  Designing a website for search is an exercise in designing a best practice website. Search engine crawlers notice errors in your code, so valid code is a must for SEO. And that makes for a healthier, more accessible website. Accessible for Google’s crawlers, and for people.
  
• Repeat Business
  Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!
  
• Customer Acquisition - Targeted Prospects
  Search is demand-driven, so anybody referred from a search engine is hoping that your web page matches their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to see, they may well become your next customer.

Focus on Unique Content

• We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this. Remember that quality content attracts quality links. And that links are still very important for SEO. So if you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.
  
• Credibility / Brand Perception
  “Why aren’t you in Google for ‘car insurance’”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?
  
• Findability
  Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product review, a person…