What is “bounce rate” and why do your visitors “bounce”?

Bounce rate measures the number of visitors who immediately leave as soon as they land on your website. This usually happens when your website does not have what they’re looking for.

Visitors usually “bounce” from three key areas of your website: home page, navigation pages, and content pages. Content and navigation pages normally have higher bounce rates than your home page or conversion pages. On the other hand, if your homepage and conversion pages have recorded high bounce rates, there might be something wrong with them in general; either you need to tweak your website copy, redesign your website, put a compelling offer, make your calls to action appear more prominent, or even install a blog or forums to make your website more interactive. Critical pages such as the home page and the conversion page should immediately engage your visitors, cater to their interests, and encourage them to visit other pages on your site. Your critical pages serve as portals to your website, so when your visitors leave the gate immediately, you need to investigate why.

A High Bounce Rate May Mean Lost Sales

A percentage of your bounce rate probably comprises of people who look for valuable information that you can easily provide through quality content; however, if some of these people include those who actually have the intention to buy your products or engage your services, you may be losing sales.

Website visitors who are ready to make a purchase have very little time to waste. Unlike someone who needs to be persuaded, interested buyers are ready to go.

How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

When your bounce rate reaches as high as 50%, look at how your content affects your visitors. The keywords that you embed in your content must attract the right kind of people: those who actually search for them and find them valuable.

See if your visitors interact with your website content, and whether they flip through other pages as well. Check if your pages provide all the necessary information that your target customers normally look for.

Another way to lower your bounce rate is to simplify the steps that your visitors need to take once they decide to respond to your call to action. Simple steps provide convenience that most people like in most online transactions.

For you target customers to find your videos, you need to optimize it using your target keywords.

1. Place your target keywords in the metadata of a video. Metadata is descriptive text that contains keywords that you can place in the HTML of your video file. Use this to describe what your video is about. It is also a way to give search engine spiders the reason to rank your video.

2. Place your keywords in your video file name. Keep your keyword relevant and the same as what’s in your metadata.

3. Upload your video on YouTube. YouTube is a search engine on its own and since Google owns it, YouTube videos always come up on Google results.

4. Put your website link in your video – Since your main goal is to drive traffic to your website, your business will definitely benefit from it when your video goes viral.

5. Utilize the description box to describe what the video is about – Remember to put your hyperlinked keywords in the description. Include a link back to your website as well.

We had a client who didn’t know what to do with their glowing positive reviews on a third party peer review website. They missed out on a huge sales potential by not including these reviews in their offline marketing materials. After consulting with our team, they have since learned to value each positive review and embed them in their online and offline marketing campaigns.

For sure there are thousands of business owners out there who don’t know how to build their credibility by simply asking for testimonials or feedback from their clients. If you haven’t thought of using this powerful marketing strategy, feel free to refer to these tips:

1. Testimonials are essentially anecdotal evidence. Preserve whatever your clients said about your company or your services, and however they said it, for authenticity. Your clients’ testimonials should reflect their natural expressions — including slang words and local expressions. 

2. Do not over-edit the testimonial. Correct the wrong spellings, but allow mistakes in grammar. Using ellipses is normal to indicate pauses, while avoiding the excessive use of exclamation marks.

3. Provide the client’s name, location and job title for credibility. Someone with a professional background and lives in the same area as your target audience (if your business is location-centric) is more believable in the eyes of your potential customers.

4. Place as many types of testimonials as possible. Gather testimonials from different types of people of varying ages, gender, and location, especially if your have a wider business scope than your city. Potential leads relate more to people of the same age, gender or location as they are.

5. Place testimonials in every marketing copy you have, and not just on your website. Use them in articles, direct marketing emails, and press releases, and even in offline materials, such as brochures, posters, and print ads.

You can also place them on a separate area at your site or you can weave them into the text of any article, blog post or squeeze page. Make sure the testimonials are immediately visible at your site so potential leads read them a few seconds after they arrived.

6. Be strategic in placing your testimonials on your website. Testimonials act like lubrication in people’s minds: they prepare the way for your marketing message to influence your audience’s mind. Additionally, the more relevant your testimonials are to the marketing copy of your homepage or landing pages, the more powerful your marketing message will be. For example, if your copy discusses the product’s benefits, then strategically place a testimonial that praise your products enthusiastically. Emphasize the good and the positive in the testimonials by typing them in bold or italics.

7. Ask your clients the right questions in order to get the right content in your testimonials. Clients appreciate direct-to-the point questions that also allow them freedom to express the positive and negative points of your products or services. Take the positive ones and use them in your testimonials, and take note of the negative ones as bases to improve your products or services.

8. Prepare your customer survey questions well and ask clients to answer immediately following an after sales checkup or after you complete your project for them. Ask them at their happiest or giddiest moments because they will be most motivated to give you a great testimonial during that time.

9. Include a photo with the text of your clients’ testimonials. Better yet, use videos or audio recordings for greater impact and stronger credibility. Once other people have seen that the testimonials came from real people, they will trust you more.

10. A much more effective testimonial is something served up from credible third-party sites, such as review sites or blogs. Reviews from peer review websites, such as Yelp, can more powerfully influence people to seek out your product or service than ordinary customers can.

These tips are just a few of many techniques that you can use in order to build you business credibility. Although these tips focused more on using client testimonials on your website to attract more leads, the same techniques work well in other marketing media, such as posters, print ads and TV ads.