Low traffic, high bounce rates

Looky-loos and tie-kickers are an unfortunate part of every business. Online though, where the cost to "visit" a store is low, they can be troubling.

Having 70-90% of people walk into a physical store to only turn around and walk out would kill the a physical store. In online stores though, it's much more common as we can see from this Shopify merchant:

Currently, I’m not getting a lot of traffic to my site. When I do, the bounce rate is high. How can I effectively use SEO to drive traffic, decrease bounce rate, and increase product purchases?

Bounce rates measure how many visitors are not engaged. Typically people who only look at one page or stuck around for less than 10 seconds.

No matter what you sell, those people aren't considered customers or even good prospects. Hence why every store should try to decrease their bounce rate. More people sticking around means more potential buyers and orders.

Why bounce rates matter

Math-wise bounce rates is really interesting when you compare it to orders.

Let's say you have an 80% bounce rate overall and a 3% purchase conversion rate. Middle-of-the-road for ecommerce.

With 100 visitors, you'll have 20 browse around and only 3 buyers. You're converting 3 of those 20 people into customers, which is 15%.

Let's say you cut your bounce rate to 60%, what happens?

With 100 visitors, you'll now have 40 browsers, but now you have 6 buyers. That 15% held steady, you just have twice as many browsers (20 vs 40) so you have twice as many buyers.

Getting people to stick around in your store a bit more doubled your sales and conversion rates. All with the same 100 visitors, no new traffic generation needed.

Bounce rate seems like it would be worth improving right?

Overall bounce rate

Improving your overall bounce rate can be tricky. That's because each page might have its own reasons for causing visitors to bounce.

There are some (passive and not so passive) aggressive marketing things stores have been doing that really harm bounce rates. Things like pop-ups, passive-aggressive phrased content ("No I don't want to live longer" links to close a pop-up), and a general overuse of in-your-face and flashy animations.

Beyond that, the top reason for people to bounce are unmet expectations.

Think about the person's journey. Say they start at a search engine as most people do these days. They enter a question and see a bunch of results. They skim over them and select your store's search result. Now they're on your page and bounce.

Why would someone spend the time to do all of that, only to bounce off the page right away?

Because something they saw in your search results gave them a set of expectations that your page failed to make good on.

Maybe the product was sold out.

Maybe the price was too high.

Maybe the search result promised a benefit that the page never delivered on.

Maybe the page design was messed up and they couldn't see what they were looking for.

Maybe the page never finished loading.

Maybe the page started to auto-play a video with music which embarrassed the person. (Happened to me last night while cooking dinner)

The key to fixing bounce rates is to identify why people are bouncing.

Identify your bouncers

Start going step by step through your customer journeys to see what visitors are seeing before and as they arrive on your page.

This can be looking at the search results to see what titles, descriptions, images, and Rich Results you have.

This can be looking at your ads and what creatives look like.

Take detailed notes and even screenshots of these to better understand what's going through their heads.

(I'd also recommend using your browser's private windows for this as oftentimes your site will show something different to a brand new visitor)

Make sure to look at multiple pages for this. What might be bouncing someone off a specific product page might be fine on a different product or your blog posts.

Eventually you'll start to see some common problems. Too aggressive and pushy opt-ins, odd and confusing designs, or nonsense in search results can all start to be apparent after evaluating a handful of pages.

Document and fix your bounce rate

Now that you see what could be the problem, document and fix them. A before and after with screenshots is great but even a simple note of "reworked SEO descriptions to better summarize the pages" is a fine note.

You're documenting so that when you need to do this again on other pages, you can remember what you changed. It's to speed up the whole "why are they bouncing?" part of the process.

This whole project probably sounds boring and excruciatingly tedious but think about the results again.

If you can cut your bounce rate, that's going to directly impact sales. All without having to spend more advertising money, fight for SEO rankings, or get a single new visitor.

Herds of consultants (flocks? schools? murders?) talk everyday about improving your conversion rates. Bounce rates are the first step and have the potential to have even more impact.