High Bounce Rate Low Affiliate Sales

by Joshua King on November 26, 2011 · 0 comments

in Seo Tactics

Last week I really had no clue what a bounce rate was. Do you? You should! As the bounce rate is a measure of how long that all important visitor stays on your blog before they exits your site without viewing any of the other pages or more importantly signing up to your list or buying that product!.

Need something more fancy schmacy visit this detailed description of the bounce rate.

Did you know that a high  Bounce Rate will kill your blog sales and drive first time vistors away from your blog or website in one click of a mouse.

I have to say that over the last week I was a manic trying to understand my next new lesson called the bounce rate. I was hunched over my laptop trying to absorb all of the information and at the same time cringe at every one of the mistakes that I had made in blog all of these areas.

I guess that this biz is all about constant learning so my goal is to share my findings and results with you my dear readers. As you may of notice made some major changes after my bounce rate lesson, some of which you will see and many more that  you won’t

If you have never been to the site before the last week I am soooooooooo glad, because honestly it was a really crappy poorly layed out dump of a blog with a bounce rate a little above 60% and 280 unique visitors a day.

So the goal of my post tonight is to explain what simple changes were made to this blog and  how you can apply these changes to your blog or web site so you to can experience the same results that the SEO Blog Guy did. What were the results by making the changes to the blog? After a week my bounce rate dropped to 33% and my traffic has doubled!

So why is the Bounce Rate such a big deal?

You see in my past life, before I became a blogger and internet marketer, I was in the food and beverage business.  So I thought it would be kinda cool to explain how I see the bounce rate…. but I am going to explain the bounce rate in a story!

Once upon a time in a land not so far away…. you walk into a restaurant that you have never been at before. As you enter the doors you notice a lot of clutter in the hostess area, at first its no big deal, but then you sit down and the waitress brings you a menu…

You notice that the menu, it’s stained and worn, filled with spelling mistakes and sentance structure errors…but you press forward and order your food.  (you see,  you did pick up all of these perceptions in a matter of seconds of being there) but then you wait and you wait and you wait.

The food arrives and it is plated poorly and is of the lowest qaulity.

WOULD YOU COME BACK?

You see the story above relates to your blog or web site and as you will learn these results affects your bounce rate which will kill your return traffic and more importantly your sales.

Here are some tips to help you make the changes to your blog or web site and as a result affect your bounce rate.

 

Bounce Rate Layout and design guidelines

  1. Keep all of your pages neat and clean. Avoid clutter at all costs and keep things simple (what do you see when you go to google’s front page)
  2. Ensure that there is adequate white space around word groups and images.
  3. Lose the pop ups, those magic light  boxes etc. (no matter what the sales copy tells you most sane people click out of them and truly dispise them)
  4. group your ads and resize your images so you have more uniformity to your layout
  5. Keep the site easy to navigate. Avoid the use of to many links and images. Simplicity draws people further into your blog and site
  6. Make use of a solid font type.
  7. Use the same color pattern throughout your design.

 

Technical Blog and Site Elements that affect the Bounce Rate

Google provides a large number of free resources that allow you to test and tweek your blog or site and improve your bounce rate. Below in a more simplified version.

  1. Choose a theme that is easy on the eyes
  2. Optimize all of your images and see if you can’t find images that will load in a few seconds
  3. get a page load plugin to help you with structure your speed and page load times
  4. create more pages than posts. Pages are fixed and will download faster (google also likes pages better than posts
  5. reduce the page fluff

 

We hope you this lesson on bounce rates helpful. For more great articles please visit the author’s daily updated blog SEO Blog Guy

 

 

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