Improve the Bounce Rates of your Online Store (part 2)

See how that works?! You’ve just helped improve my bounce rate. Setting up this blog to transition from one page to another is a simple way to show Google that people are interested in learning more from your site. All I had to do was make some slight adjustments to the internal workings of my blog to accomplish this goal. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to read part one of 5 Quick Ways to Improve Bounce Rates!

Now that we’ve covered the basics of bounce rates, pinpointing issues, and internal features to improve on, let’s continue with our list.

Whether your marketing efforts are paid or organic, they need to be focused on industry specific keywords and phrases to bring in a quality flow of traffic. If your site is optimized with relevant keywords, it will appear in targeted searches and bring visitors that are interested in continuing to explore your website. The keywords you choose will also be used in any paid marketing campaigns you take on. Using irrelevant or vague terms will attract traffic that is not ideal for your niche, which will likely increase your bounce rates.

Brand mentions and implied links, though not as powerful as deep links from authority sites, are helpful in attracting a flow of quality, organic traffic. Brand mentions can include guest blogging, creating and distributing infographics, hosting ‘like / share’ contests, or seeking out media that would features interviews with you. Many of these options will also allow a backlink but make sure you’re only linking to sites that are in your same industry, or Google will consider the backlink a negative, rather than a positive link.

There are certain user behaviors that contribute to high bounce rates. If you put out useful content that is frequently bookmarked, it may earn higher than average bounce rates. Any page that delivers all the information that’s needed in one swoop, or provides a same-page check-out, will also lead to a higher bounce rate. This type of behavior may not be bad for your business, even though it’s bad for bounce rates. It’s up to the business owner to find the balance between call-to-actions that take a user to an external site or call-to-explore buttons, which promote quality internal links and improve bounce rates.

With Google starting to organize search results by location, there’s a good argument for setting up local pages that target every city or region that you want to market to and rank well with. People are supporting local businesses more right now than ever before so take advantage and pump up your local pride with localized pages. Sure, we want to appeal to a global audience but don’t ignore the potential of your own backyard and favorite cities in doing so! Local love is great for word-of-mouth and organic marketing power and can help you fix your bounce rates.

Improving bounce rates and keeping your site in shape is a constantly evolving challenge. Taking note of these issues that affect bounce rates should help you troubleshoot some of the overlooked but easy-to-fix concerns.