Simple Steps to Lower Your Homepage Bounce Rate
What's a "bounce rate"?
The Problem with Most Homepages ...
As a business owner / manager or as a website designer, we can find everything on our website because we built them. Customers visiting our website are coming in blind. If they can't immediately find what they're looking for, to them, it doesn't exist.
We have to make the homepage intuitive, easy to use, and easy for the customer to find what they're looking for. By adding 2 or 3 contrasting block elements to a website homepage, you will give the visitor an immediate selection and path to choose from.
This makes it easy, doesn't make the visitor think and has ALWAYS dropped the bounce rate by at least 10% on the homepage.
A Couple Samples of Contrasting Block Elements
Advanced Solutions to Lowering Your Bounce Rate
The information above is primarily for smaller businesses with smaller or more limited product / service lines. For companies with hundreds or thousands of products, it's going to take a little more time, space and testing to create better landing pages.
We are interested in creating two landing pages.
Landing Page 1: This landing page is for visitors who typed in your URL directly in the browser. They did not use a search engine such as google or yahoo to access your website. Our task is much harder because we're flying blind - we have no idea what the visitor is looking for. In such an instance, you want to offer two distinguished paths ... popular or new products / services & product / service categories and sub-categories. The trick is to offer enough information so the visitors feels confident that you offer what he / she is looking for without confusing them with too much information.
Landing Page 2: This landing page is for visitors who came to your website from a search engine. The first thing to do is get the search term used to access your website. Based on this search term, we should be showing items that are specifically related. Giving the visitor exactly what they're seeking will lower your bounce rate immediately. Under this segment you can show either (a) new or popular item / service categories / sub-categories related to the search term or (b) all product / service categories and sub-categories as in Landing Page 1.
Conclusions
Bounce rates are important. Any business with a website should be concerned about these numbers. While this is only one of many methods to reduce your bounce rate, it will help. Just remember to put yourself in your visitor's shoes and view the situation with empathy. Do your best to see through your visitor's eyes and you'll make great strides in increasing your online sales.
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