How do you make sure that relevant visitors landing on your site know that they’ve landed on the right page? If you don’t succeed in doing this effectively a large number of your visitor are going to bounce. Ensuring that first time visitors can immediately engage with your site directly affects your site’s ability to convert visitors into real business.
When looking at this it is easy to get caught up in looking at your main landing pages to the exclusion of the other pages. At RevaHealth.com we have historically focused on our search results pages to the exclusion of pages deeper in the site.
Old Page
However, times change and we have over 1.5 million pages indexed by Google. Every month Google sends traffic to a about 250,000 different pages including a large number of deep and seemingly unimportant pages. The vast majority of landings are still on our main search results pages; however there are an increasing number of visitors landing on individual clinic’s profiles.
These profile pages all had a disproportionally large bounce rate when compare to the rest of the site and looking at the pages it should come as no surprise. For an engaged audience they present the information in a reasonably structured fashion, however for a visitor who has just landed on the page it’s a bit difficult to see why they should stick around.
The most obvious way to reduce bounce on these pages would be to eliminate the advertising. However these pages rely on advertising for revenue generation, so we elected to see if we could reduce the bounce rate while attempting to keep advertising revenue static.
We introduced a navigation panel on the right hand side. The purpose of this panel is to inform the visitor about relevant content in the rest of the site. The key points are:
New Page
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The number of relevant clinics in the immediate area that they might be interested in.
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Up to three sample clinics in the immediate area.
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The number of relevant clinics in a broader geography with a means of navigating to them.
Other changes we made to the page were:
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A new call to action within the address field – “Get Phone Number”. About 20% of the visitors to our site are actively looking for a clinic’s telephone number. We don’t want to immediately display this number because we want to track it, however we absolutely want visitors to know that it is available.
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Introduction of default Description Text where we do not have a description of the clinic along with a call to action.
After making these changes, the bounce rate of the profile pages dropped by nearly 7%, causing an overall drop in the site’s bounce rate of just over 2%.
We’d love to hear your experiences with bounce reduction, especially any unexpected results you had.
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