Firstly, what is ‘bounce rate‘? It is the percentage of people that visit your site and leave without viewing any further pages. They literally bounce right off your site back to Google or another site.

There really is no good bounce rate. It depends very much on industry and the type of audience you are attracting and the intentions of your visitors.

For example, an informational site might have a high bounce rate as most people will find the information they want on the page they land on. Also, MOT centres or emergency plumbers or electricians are likely to have a high bounce rate as the client is more likely to call than email, typically speaking.

Pay Per Click landing pages are likely to also have a high bounce rate as are targeted pages, such as blog posts that are designed to answer a question but it doesn’t mean the user didn’t find what they were after if they leave without viewing further pages.

Sites that have a lot of information on different pages that a user is likely to want to read or those that don’t have a prominent phone number may – annoyingly – have a lower bounce rate.

Also a well-optimised site that has focused pages that cover the keyword areas well are also likely to have a higher bounce rate (more annoyingly!) if they give the user all of the information they need on the one page they land on.

Most people would probably normally expect an optimised site to have a lower bounce rate it seems it really isn’t the case. So, what can we learn from this way of looking at things?

If your call-to-actions are prominent enough a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, providing your site is doing what it set out to do; attract business. Bounce rate isn’t the ‘be all and end all’.

Put another way, although a high bounce rate can sometimes be worrying to discover, providing it is contributing towards generating business at acceptable levels the site is obviously working well in terms of achieving its goals and doesn’t necessarily warrant making major changes.

Prominent phone numbers on the site should allow all of your visitors to get in touch with you easily if that was their intention, regardless of whether they bounced or not.

An interesting but very logical angle on something that is so commonly assumed to be a bad reflection of the quality of the site.

Suggestion: If you are still keen to lower your bounce rate, try Google Website Optimizer to A-B test two versions of the site and see which works best? A higher bounce rate that gives the user everything they need on one page or lower bounce rate that pushes the user to navigate around the site to find what they are after?

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…

Google make hundreds of changes to their search ranking algorithm each year and this year is no exception – over 500 changes were made to help improve the way Google delivers results to the end user.

In line with Google’s efforts to keep the search results fresh and current, I thought I’d list some of the most recent changes Google has made to the search results to improve the quality even further.

In brief, here are 5 of the changes Google has made to the search results over the last couple of weeks that affect the vast majority of us:

Fresher Search Results

Affecting over 35% of all search queries, Google have made changes to place emphasis on more resent content. This would affect news items, blogs and also recently updated pages so now it’s more important than ever to keep your website current and update it regularly.

Date-Restricted Search

As a result in part of the above changes to place emphasis on fresh content, date-restricted search – whereby a user selects a date range to display results from – Google have made changes to make their search results for these dates more consistently accurate.

Official Page Detection

We know that Google places a lot of emphasis on brands to determine which site should be displayed for a particular brand search, such as the actual home page for a particular company, club or brand name. Google has announced that this has now been refined to make their judgement more accurate and consistent.

More Comprehensive Search Results

Snippets that appear within the search results have been made more comprehensive as the crawlers begin to understand page structure better. Google are now able to include more page content and less information from headers and/or menu systems allowing us to see more relevant information in the search results to help us make a better decision on whether we want to visit each particular site.

Better Page Titles

Looking at a number of signals when generating a page title for the search results, Google is now placing places less emphasis on duplicated anchor text in links pointing to a particular page. The result of this is being able to display titles that are more specific to the content of the page itself.

When it comes to creating your homepage, whether you get it professionally developed or are doing it yourself, it’s easy to focus on what you want from a website and what you want to put across to your visitors, speaking of the content and its message specifically.

Unfortunately, this message doesn’t always match up to the questions that your visitors need answering when they first land on your site. Sometimes you need to take a step back from the message you want to put across and think about things a little more the way your visitors would see it.

More specifically, answer those age-old questions that date back way before the internet arrived. The 5 W’s (and a H); Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Addressing these questions on your homepage will ensure that the majority of your visitors’ questions will be answered and – if done in the right way – should also give them trust in your website and give them more reason to get in touch, place an order or – at the very least – stick around longer to view more of your site and what you offer or have to say.

Think of it as your first meeting with a prospective client. You want this to be as positive and effective as possible while keeping the client interested and answering their most common and foremost questions quickly.

Once that’s out of the way you can start selling to them by answering other questions or working your own message on what’s important into the main message.

Your website should be your online sales tool and (again, if done right) will be selling to prospective clients in your sleep and you should be doing everything you can to ensure that the right message is put across in the right way and as effectively as possible.

Normally, hiding your backlink isn’t something that you should really have the need to do – or want to do – but if you have competitors that relentlessly scour your backlinks month on month to pick up the best links on the back of your hard work.

If you find them compulsively cheating instead of doing their own research and utilising their own knowledge of the industry you both work in then you may find the need to give them a hard time. How? By hiding your little nuggets of gold in piles of dirt. Or, in English, hiding your great links in a list of lesser quality links.

Hiding backlinks isn’t something I tend to make a habit of… In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever built links to disguise others from lazy rivals but it does happen. In all honestly I try to build links in a variety of different areas of varying quality to ensure that my backlink profile remains as natural as possible and not ‘forced’ – if that’s the right word to use… probably not.

Directories

Online directories are a good place to start. You can get some really good quality directory links while others don’t offer much value at all and the SEO value isn’t always relative to price. A lot of directories offer a free review and are easy to complete. Many have long waiting lists so you can ensure that the links will go live over a period of months so will appear natural and can be used to build links to internals pages of your site as well as long-tail variations of your keywords to help things look natural.

Blog Comments

Again, these are quick and easy and you can link to internal pages of your site to help push variations of your keywords to help with your SEO campaign while also muddying up your link profile.

Nofollowed Links

Although links with the nofollow attribute will not help you in terms of SEO or ranking, they do get listed regularly by sites that list inbound links to a site, meaning that your competitors will have to sift through a load of links to get any real gold out of your hard work.

I can’t say that it’s massively important for anyone to go to these lengths, as it isn’t really what real SEO is about in my opinion, but if you do feel the need to hide or disguise your backlink profile it can help slow down your competition. At the same time you can sift through their backlink profile as well as some of your other competitors and other industry sites and grab the best from their worlds while covering your own tracks, helping you to speed ahead and win the race to the top of Google.