Improve Your Bounce Rate Using Onsite SEO Techniques
Author:
Hannah Gibson 
SEO
As Goole’s aim to rank genuine, quality websites becomes more of a priority, it makes sense that they can’t just rely on the number or quality of links a site has and place more importance on usability factors to determine what a good website is. One key usability factor to be considered is bounce rates, so this week I thought I’d suggest ways to improve bounce rate, through typical onsite optimisation techniques.
What is bounce rate?
To explain my thoughts, I think it’s best to firstly define what bounce rate is. A ‘bounce’ is effectively when someone lands on a website and doesn’t look at any other page on the site before leaving that site. So if a site’s bounce rate is 60% then 60% of its visitors had landed on the site then left without viewing another page. This leads me to my first point – page title and meta description optimisation.
Page title & meta description
It’s all very well optimising your page title and meta description for your target keyword to encourage people searching that keyword to click through to your website, but have you optimised these elements for the right page? If you’re targeting the keyword ‘wooden toys’ and place these keywords in your page title and meta description, your visitors will click through expecting to find wooden toys on your landing page. In this case, you would make sure the page you’ve optimised actually contains wooden toys whether it be a category page dedicated to wooden toys or a page which contains images, banners, headings or a clear navigational link to that category page or products. If your visitor can’t see what they’re looking for straight away, they’re likely to bounce and go elsewhere.
Heading tags
As well as optimising the page title and meta description, a well-optimised page should also contain the target keywords in key areas. SEO’s know that including keywords in your heading 1 is best practice for optimisation, but this doesn’t mean that you can style your h1 tag in such a way that it’s just as small as your normal text, or hide it away below the fold because it looks better for your design. The whole reason search engines favour sites with keywords in headings is because they are supposed to stand out on the page for usability reasons. To stop your visitors from bouncing, ensure you heading 1 is acting like a well behaved heading 1 – it’s placed above the fold, is bigger than your normal text, and can be seen quite clearly on the page. It gives your visitor re-assurance that they have found what they’re looking for so they’re less likely to leave.
Page load time
There’s been a lot of speculation of page load times and whether it is an important ranking factor or not. Whether it’s a high ranking factor or not, it’s highly important for usability, and in particularly for bounce rates. In today’s impatient world, visitors are used to sites loading within 2-3 seconds. If your page load time is longer than this, it could be causing your visitors to bounce as they can’t be bothered waiting for the site to load. As the Google Analytics code is placed in the <head> it is common for it to load before the rest of the page has, and before users click the back button, giving that visit a bounce rate of 100%. Make sure you use the right techniques to reduce your page load time, or make sure your site is hosted on a big enough server for the size of your site. Your visitors are more likely to hang around if your site is super fast and they can jump from page to page in no time.
So remember that not only should you optimise the right elements of your site, but also remember why these elements are key to optimisation in the first place (hint: usability!). Create a landing page using CSS styles as they should be used and choose the right landing page for your keywords to make sure the only reason your visitors are bouncing is because you sell space hoppers at a decent price…
