How Do you Reduce Bounce Rates?

[TylerReardon]

I'm doing work for a website right now that sells musical instruments. They have great content on their site but we're helping them to create even better content. We've been working with them for 2 weeks now and they average about 180 site views a day according to Google analytics.

Their pages also have very high bounce rates (70-98%)

What are your best ways to reduce bounce rates?

[EGOL]

What are your best ways to reduce bounce rates?

Create lots of content about high interest topics and then make seductive links to those pages and place them where every visitor will see them.

Their pages also have very high bounce rates (70-98%)

Sounds like this might be image search visitors.

[matbennett]

That is pretty high. However don't assume that all bounces are bad.  A bounce can actually be an indication that your site has done it's job well - it's down to the intent of the user.

I prefer to look at bounce rates either by page or by term.  If people are bouncing on terms that are likely to have commercial intent then that isn't great. However for informational searches it might mean that the site is answering their query.  That strong content might be the cause - you're becoming a reference site.  Not necessarily bad.

However, bounces rarely pay bills...  Try separating out searches with commercial and informational intent and compare both the volume and bounce rate.  That might give some indication as to how best to tackle the issue (and what issue you are tackling).

If you have a high bounce rate on terms with commercial intent then look at the quality of your product information, pricing, issues around trust etc.  If you can get outside opinion on it, even a small sample, that can help.

Conversely, if the problem is that you have an overly large proportion of research only terms then if could be that you need to look at how to increase visibility on the more commercial terms, or possibly look at ways to turn those information seekers in to customers (check loyaly and visits to purchase... they might be already, but just taking their time).

Pretty big topic actually.

[PastaFreak]

I would suggest to to find out how visitors get to these pages that have high bounce rates. Perhaps they end up there via search terms that are not relevant enough. If that is not the case then you need to go into the content. Is it clear enough, do you have good products images and are they big enough. You could consider asking people that leave a page to answer 3 simple questions (there are tools for that) and find out why they left the page.

Good luck!

[TylerReardon]

I totally agree with you. This is an e-commerce site that sells guitars though. The information is there. For some reason the bounce rates are high.

Could it have to do with the way the products are shown and the formatting of the page?

[EGOL]

I would suggest to to find out how visitors get to these pages...

That's Mark's comment.  I agree with him.

[CMC-SD]

Absolutely. If the content of the page matches the apparent query intent, then the problem may be that people simply don't want to give their money to this company. Does the site look professional? Does it look reputable? Is the information laid out in a clear, attractive way? Are the pictures bright and appealing? It's the difference between walking into a dim, dirty shop with tacky decor and messy displays and a comfortable, beautiful department store.

Conversion rate optimization is a huge topic -- as big as SEO itself. Rand did a high-level overview webinar about CRO recently, but they had repeated technical problems so I don't think they uploaded it to the SEOmoz webinar section (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars). He recommended Conversion Rate Experts' blog (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/).