Today I'd like to go over some specific ways you can achieve a bounce rate for your jewelry store website that is lower than the 47% average that I've measured. The ideas here are come directly from websites that have consistently had lower than average visitors bouncing.Idea One: Increase the number of return visitors to your site.
Getting people to come back to your site again and again is achievable if you simply share pages or product from your website to any of the social networks. Over the last few weeks many jewelers successfully used this approach by changing their websites to show special offers for Mother's Day and then sharing that special offer to one of their social networks. The social sharing generated interest and brought people back to their website.
Idea Two: Using Google Analytics, find the top landing pages of your website and take a close look at them.
Do those pages have a lot or a little information on them? How about the number of other inviting links to other pages on your site? By tweaking the top landing page of your website you can better entice people to click at least 1 more page rather than leaving your site after the first page.
As an example, many jewelers have jewelry educational pages on their website. This includes the basic 4Cs information and the typical birthstone guide. Sadly though these educational pages are usually exactly what someone is searching for, and they leave, for example, after reading what the birthstone of the month is. On the other hand, you might be able to get someone to click into your product catalog by simply including a photo and a link to a sapphire pendant next to September's birthstone.
So jazz up those educational pages with product catalog links.
Idea Three: Take the minimalist approach.
I'm not a fan of this approach, but I also can't deny the statistics that clearly show it works. The idea here taps into the fact that your home page will be the most popular landing page. Several jewelers have successfully lowered their bounce rates by removing all content from their home page except 1 large image or a series of fading images and then navigation links.
With this approach the user is forced to click on one of the provided navigation links in order to get more information. Remember, bounce rate is a measure of how many people visit a single page on your site. This method forces someone to click to a second page. However, I have one caution about this approach, which is to make sure your navigation menus are easy to understand, and easy to see. Preferably you would include obvious links to other landing pages of your site without using dropdown menus.
With all this talk of bounce rate you might be wondering why it's even important. The obvious reason is that there is a greater opportunity to sell when someone stays on your website longer. The less obvious reason is that Google prefers to rank websites according to how satisfied users are when visiting. Bounce rate is part of that satisfaction rating. Your SERP ranking potential will increase as your bounce rate declines.
