Good SEO strategies can have your site listing at the top of the search engines for most of your keywords and phrases. As result you will see a steady stream of organic traffic flowing to your site. The question is – how long are they staying? If they arrive on your site and leave just as quickly without accessing other pages, you will have what is known as a high bounce rate. That means no readers and few if any sales.
If your bounce rate is high you will need to closely examine why. They are obviously finding you in the search engines so why are they not staying?
The first place to look is your landing page. Does it sell your site or your business? If it does then perhaps it is overselling and scaring the users away. Your landing page needs to welcome the visitor whilst providing them with what they have come to look at.
Many website owners make a mistake in optimizing a wide set of keywords but not having relevant landing pages to those keywords. If you optimize for cat food, I don’t want to land on a page promoting dog food. At worst, you should have a page that promotes pet food with clear navigation links to cat, dog food etc.
One of the other issues is the optimizing of generic terms rather than using more specific terms. Using the above example, you may optimize pet food when all you sell is dog food. I click on the pet food link only to find it is for dogs only.
There are two alternatives to this problem. First you can simply concentrate on the terms relevant to your site or you can optimize the meta tags so that the search engine listing clearly states dog food only. The later will ensure you get listed for ‘pet food’ queries. Users generally read the descriptions so the traffic you do receive will be focused – in this case, on dog food.
These steps will reduce your bounce rate and see your sales conversion rates rise. A win for you and a win for users who are not winding up on your site by accident.
