How To Reduce Bounce Rate on Interior Designer Websites

January 7, 2016 Michael Conway

Reducing A Website Bounce Rate Is Good For SEO

Understand and remember that a high bounce rate is awful and can have cascading effects that can impact your site. When we write blogs for clients, we include a link to another page on the site early in the article. Google uses bounce rate as one aspect of page ranking. If your bounce rate is high, it can negatively affect your site placement on search result pages. Reducing bounce rate isn’t a site-specific thing there is no magic bullet or a single set of rules that will guarantee a reduction.

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First, Know Your Visitors

While taking steps like including illustrations, updating your site’s design, using photography and proper formatting can help to reduce your bounce rate, to make functional changes means you need to know your visitors! The root of the bounce rate problem lies with not understanding your visitors and exactly what they are looking for when they come to your site. To begin to understand who is coming to your site, start by checking out your analytics. Two measures to explore and compare include new unique visits versus return visitors.

This one single data point can help you to understand how to structure your pages, what type of messages are useful, and how to create your copy and content. Are your visitors seeking technical information or simple descriptions of your product? What language do they read? Look at their demographics, age, geographic location, and also what pages they are visiting and what information they’re interested in learning.

Dig into your audience and understand your visitors before you change anything. Know what language they speak, where they’re from, what information they’re seeking and why they came to your site. You won’t be able to “fix” anything meaningful if you don’t know your visitors!

What Do Website Visitors Want?

Once you understand who is visiting your site, the next step is to determine what they want. Attracting the right users to your site starts by seeding your content with the keywords that will bring them to you.

Hopefully, you’ve done some keyword research and have identified the words and phrases your target market would use to search for you. You should already be ranking for branded keywords. Expand and cover niche keywords and phrases to expand your search rankings.

If you understand what your visitors want when they find your site, and you deliver it, they have no real reason to bounce. The best way to do this is by providing unique, relevant content to meet their needs.

Website Usability = A Great User Experience!

Creating a comfortable, informative, and entertaining user experience is the key to keeping visitors engaged with your content. One of the features we love about Squarespace websites is the ability to move pages quickly for the best user experience. Usability is the key. Here are a couple of things to bear in mind when designing your site and creating content:

• Keep your content relevant and easy to find! Put the good stuff above the fold. If your user searches for a particular term and doesn’t see it immediately when they arrive, they’re likely to bounce. If your content is relevant and based on the keywords they used, make it obvious. Put it above the fold!

• Keep your Navigation simple and intuitive. If the user wants to visit other pages and can’t find your navigation they’ll bounce. Make it easy. Place navigation where it’s obvious and easily found.

• Design counts! Make your site look professional. Users can tell a shoddy site from a well designed one. As an interior design firm use photos, drawings, and high graphic design to portray your brand image. It gives you a sense of legitimacy in your user’s eyes.

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The best way to reduce your bounce rate is to give your users an impressive and practical user experience. That keeps them on your site.

Make Them An Offer They Can’t Refuse!

The hottest design, perfect keywords more pictures and killer headlines aren’t enough! To get conversions you have to entice users to act on your CTAs! A bounce happens when a visitors clicks on your page and then leaves. That’s all there is to it! If a user doesn’t click to go anywhere else and leaves, that’s a bounce.

Here’s the tricky part. Even with your improvements your bounce rate can go up! How you ask?

If you’ve done your job, know your user, understand what information they’re seeking, give them a beautiful, functional page, you may have in fact created the perfect bounceable page! A page that gives your user all of the information they’re looking for so that they don’t need to go anywhere else may result in them clicking off the page. They’re done so they bounce. End of story!

So here’s how to reduce your bounce rate, while still giving users a killer experience and information they need. You need to make them act! Optimize your page by:

• Ensure that you have conversion paths on every page. If it’s a blog, give them the option to “learn more”, include a call-to-action for a guide to using an interior designer or link to a portfolio of examples that pertain to your blog topic. Whatever the method, optimize your pages to convert!

• Make “hot” zones clickable. If there a section of the page where users tend to hover, and it can be made clickable, add a link. There are various third-party programs that use graphical overlays to determine where users are interacting with your site, hovering and scrolling. It’s called “heat mapping” and it can give your analytics a real edge.

A useful page doesn’t only get hits and give users the information they’re after; it asks them to act on that information. Use CTAs efficiently and make your users act! The moment visitors do, they’re no longer a bounce rate statistic.

Finally, Make It Mobile Friendly!

More users are accessing your information from their mobile devices every day. Make sure your site incorporates responsive design elements for a smooth user experience. Make your site beautifully intuitive and usable on mobile devices and you’ll lower your bounce rate. It’s not just about being mobile friendly, think mobile usability!

You’ll always have a bounce rate, but remember, the lower you can get your bounce-rate the higher your conversion rate. Lowering your bounce rate can improve your SEO making it easier to find you, increase your conversion rate, and generate sales that flow directly to your bottom line. Reducing your bounce rate can pave the way to success. Is your SEO suffering from a missing link?

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About Means-of-Production

I’m Michael Conway and my firm builds Squarespace websites, email marketing campaigns and Houzz profiles and project pages for home design and construction companies. Our all-in-one tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition. Contact me for a free-of-charge consultation and marketing review. It takes about 40 minutes and you'll be provided a list of actionable improvements designed to solve your specific marketing problems.