Many businesses invest tens of thousands of dollars every month into SEO and SEM in order to generate traffic to their website, only to realize that large amounts of the traffic they’re receiving is leaving after viewing only a single page.
People that only visit one page on your website before leaving are called “bounces,” and the typical measure of bounce activity is “bounce rate.” This metric is tracked by just about every analytics software available, including Google Analytics.
A high bounce rate is almost always undesirable. It indicates that your website isn’t gaining the trust of visitors, that your content isn’t engaging or that there’s simply no reason for visitors to stay after visiting the first page they reach.
Luckily, like many other metrics used to track marketing performance, bounce rate is relatively easy to reduce. These five strategies will help you reduce your bounce rate and get more attention and revenue from each visitor to your B2B website.
If you’re marketing your website using AdWords PPC and notice an exceptionally high bounce rate, your advertisements may be promising more than your website actually delivers.
One of the most common causes of a high bounce rate is a mismatch between the promises in your advertising copy and your website’s content. Being deceptive or misleading will earn you a high CTR, but few of the clicks will be worth much.
If your landing pages have a high bounce rate (anything over 80% is high) it might pay to test variations of your advertising copy that make more modest claims to see if they keep visitors on your website for longer.
The key cause of high bounce rate for landing pages is a mismatch between sales-driven copy and the reality of the offer. For blogs and content-driven websites, it’s slightly different; a mismatch between your audience and your content.
How engaging is your website’s content? If your blog posts have a high bounce rate from search traffic, it could be because your content simply isn’t interesting enough to keep readers interested and engaged.
Counter this cause of a high bounce rate by focusing on developing content that’s in-depth, engaging and informative. Make sure it matches your audience’s expectations and answers their questions; the better your content is, the longer they’ll stay.
Sometimes even great content isn’t enough to keep visitors on your website. If your blog post doesn’t lead visitors anywhere, they’ll likely close the tab and visit another website.
Because of this, all of your blog posts and content-based pages should be a step in a longer content pathway. Add a list of your most popular blog posts to the end of all of your blog pages to funnel users towards your best content.
At the end of these pages, you can direct users towards your product and service pages and turn them into customers. Think of each page as a stepping stone that your audience can use; each one leads to another, which leads to another.
Meta descriptions are the short descriptions of your page content that Google uses to show searchers what your page is about. If you don’t write these yourself, they’ll often be generated dynamically by Google’s indexing technology.
It’s important to write detailed, informative meta descriptions that closely match the content on your website. This way, searchers won’t visit your website with an expectation that your content will cover something it actually doesn’t cover.
Keep your meta descriptions clear, concise and accurate. The more information on your website’s content they give to searchers, the more likely they are to visit – and stay on – your website after seeing it in the search results.
No matter how extensively you optimize your website to reduce bounce rate, you’ll never keep every user on-site forever. The average bounce rate for many websites is upwards of 60 percent – a reality that no amount of optimization can fix.
While it’s reduce to minimize your bounce rate, you’ll never be able to end bounces altogether. Focus on maximizing the value you can provide for the traffic you have, and don’t worry too much about capturing the attention of every visitor.
Do this by understanding your audience and targeting your content to answer their questions. Remember that it’s better to engage half of your audience than to keep a far larger number of people on-site without truly connecting with them.
When a visitor first lands at your website, what do they do? Which pages do they view and interact with? Where do these pages lead them? How many clicks will it take for them to reach your first sales-optimized landing page?
If you can’t answer the above questions, your website is likely in need of either a redesign or some serious optimization. Many B2B companies ignore the essential principles of web design, assuming that content alone is the best marketing tool.
The reality, however, is that following best practices for web design and usability will not just make your website easier for visitors to navigate; it will also make it significantly more profitable.
In this blog post, we’ll share 10 design, usability and conversion best practices for your B2B website. Think of this as a checklist – after you read each best practice, review your website and see if it needs to be optimized.
Every page on your website should have a clear goal. This goal could be to inform the visitor about a product, provide them with contact information or generate a conversion. Check that all of your pages have a clear, easily identifiable goal.
It can be tempting to optimize your website for SEO by using keywords heavily in your content. While some degree of focus on SEO is certainly a good thing, it’s not good web etiquette to overdo keyword optimization if it affects readability.
Not all pages on your website will be focused on sales. However, all pages that are informational should link to sales-driven pages. Make sure there’s a call to action linking every informational page on your website to a sales-focused landing page.
Not all of your customers will want to place orders using your website. Having an email address or support phone number that’s easily visible will allow customers who want to learn more about your product to get in touch.
Many B2B websites, particularly those designed several years ago, have designs that are overly busy and difficult to navigate. Your website’s design should be simple and clean without distracting on-page elements that could confuse users.
Logos and testimonials are both fantastic tools for improving conversions. If you’re interested in increasing your conversion rate and earning more money from every visitor to your website, consider including persuasive testimonials.
Every lead capture form on your website – from email opt-in forms to sales forms – should only be as complex as it needs to be. Avoid including unnecessary fields that complicate the buying process, unless the data is absolutely essential,
All of your calls to action – from buying buttons to links to phone numbers – should be immediately identifiable and obvious to visitors. Consider using a contrast color to make your call to action stand out and attract the attention of users.
Even in the B2B sector, a huge amount of traffic is mobile. Optimizing your website for mobile opens you up to a massive audience that’s very unlikely to buy or send a sales-related email from a desktop-only website.
If you’re not tracking your conversion funnel, you’re never going to be able to make informed tweaks to your online marketing process. Make sure your website has an analytics platform linked and carefully monitor the data your website gathers.
Not every website is perfectly optimized and up to date, and violating one or two of the best practices listed above is understandable. However, if your website follows very few of the above best practices, it could be a good time for a redesign.
