Not getting any traffic to your website is bad for business. But you already know that.
Around 92 percent of all web traffic for any given search query goes to the results on the first page of Google. If your website is not appearing here, you're not being found.
But appearing high up in search engine result pages (SERPs) is far from the be-all and end-all of SEO.
Lots of startups are spending a lot of money on SEO, getting a lot of traffic, but seeing few or no conversions at all. Sound familiar?
Sometimes the culprit is just a bad product or service, or perhaps, an uncompetitive offering. Most times, though, if you’re getting lots of traffic with a high bounce rate, you’re likely approaching content strategy and SEO all wrong.
If there is some discrepancy between your search traffic volume and conversion rates, the most likely diagnosis is that your marketing goals do not match the search intent of your audience.
Fortunately, you can start making some immediate fixes that will turn things around in no time at all.
Let us show you how less really can mean more for your brand. It’s all about quality over quantity, but there’s no reason why you can’t have both.
Here’s the breakdown:
How to Measure Traffic Quality
A high bounce rate and a low lead conversion rate can tell you that you have a problem somewhere. However, they don’t necessarily imply that the problem is low-quality traffic. As we’ve mentioned, there could be a few different contributing factors to high bounce rates or low conversion, so you’ll need a few more clues to help guide you.
Here are three clues to help you see the big picture:
High Offline Sales But Poor Online Conversions
This is easy to measure if your brand has any offline, physical retail outlets or any sort of offline marketing strategy.
If your leads are converting well offline, but your website has a high bounce rate, you might have a problem attracting the right type of traffic.
There may still be a question mark over how effective your content marketing strategy is, but you can at least rule out a bad product or service as the most likely cause.
Users Come from the Wrong Places
If your product and service offerings are designed to serve a local market, then hits from places beyond this geographical reach will be irrelevant. If this is happening, you should increasingly focus your efforts on doing more local SEO.
Your Visitors Do Not Fit the Target Persona
It’s not them; it’s you!
If your visitors are coming from areas beyond your geographical focus, that’s not such a problem. You can tweak this by simply including more local signals in your content.
A bigger challenge would be a high stream of visitors who generally do not fit your buyer persona or who are either too high up the funnel to be relevant to you.
How to Lower Your Bounce Rate and Improve Traffic Quality in 5 Steps
Hopefully, you're able to rule out having a poor or unattractive offering as the root cause of your website's high bounce rate.
Solving the problem then becomes much easier. Here are the tactics to try:
Start At the Begining: Set Some Goals
High-quality traffic is traffic that meets your marketing goals. If you don’t have any goals, then it isn’t possible to tell if your traffic is high or low quality.
The trick to this is figuring out the most relevant touchpoint for your target audience and keeping your content marketing consistently aligned with this.
Listen to the Data
Data is the heart of content marketing for obvious reasons. It is the data that tells you who’s coming to your website, who stays and who leaves, and at what points they do either.
A properly set up Google Analytics account can help you cut to the chase and figure out the best places to find the high-quality traffic that your brand is crying out for.
Monitor Form Submissions
Form submissions can be a useful source of data to augment the data you’ll be analyzing from Google Analytics. Since people who interact with your website are more likely to be marketing qualified leads (MQLs), this is something to really pay attention to.
Ideally, your forms should be set up to collect as much useful information about these leads to help you build a composite image — or buyer persona.
Optimize Your Keyword Strategy
Are you targeting high-intent keywords? These are the keywords that people search for when they are ready to make a purchase.
If your content strategy isn’t optimized to target these high-intent keywords, then you’ll be missing out on a healthy stream of traffic and attracting a low-commitment audience instead!
Optimize Traffic Retention Through Retargeting
If people are visiting your website once and never returning, this is a sign that you're not meeting their search intent. That's bad because repeat visitors are much likelier to make a purchase.
Additionally, loyal customers are generally an excellent source of income. This is why contemporary inbound marketers think of the marketing funnel as being something much closer to a flywheel model than the conventional one-way funnel model.
So how do you achieve higher rates of customer and audience loyalty? At a strategy level, the idea is to offer a deeper level of value. Tactically, one of the best ways to get this done is through email marketing.
Existing customers can be kept engaged by offering a steady stream of deep content that actually solves their pain points. Of course, you must remember to add a link or two to your website in these emails.
Make Your Traffic Count
Low-quality traffic is a source of frustration for too many brands. Luckily, you now know how to diagnose the likely causes and what to do to fix them.
One of the best ways to prevent this or to fix it when it happens is to use a powerful CMS, like Hubspot's CMS, with advanced data analytics and audience management tools.
Find out more about how First Page Strategy can help.
