Every business wants to appear at the top of Google search results but that’s really only half the battle; the next stage is keeping visitors on your website. Anyone operating a business website needs to understand a concept known as bounce rate, which is the percentage of people that visit your website but don’t click through to any other pages. The bounce rate is typically used to optimize your small business web design to create a good first impression to lower this bounce rate and keep people on your website longer.

So, how can you actually improve your visitor rentention and lower the bounce rate? Here’s a look at some effective strategies that make your website more appealing and accessible to visitors.

1. Effective Color and Contrast
You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your visitors. One way to do this is effective use of color and contrast in your web design. This is especially true if your visitors are accessing your website on a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone where a small screen resolution or poor lighting means contrast makes all the difference. You can also use contrast and color together to help direct visitor’s attention deeper into your website.

2. Make Your Purpose Clear
Visitors should automatically grasp the purpose of your website and what you do. If the purpose of your website seems confusing to first-time visitors, expect a high bounce rate. Make use of strong headlines and pictures to draw their attention to important information and make sure the layout is organized well. It’s also really important to use call-to-action buttons to help readers get more information. Call-to-action buttons can serve many purposes but they’re designed to get your visitor to actually do something, whether it’s adding an item to the shopping cart or requesting a quote. Size, color and wording are all important here so avoid vague buttons like “Learn More.”

3. Simple and Intuitive Navigation
Do your visitors find it difficult to navigate your small business web design to get where they need to go? If they take one look at your website and don’t see prominent and intuitive navigation, chances are they’ll hit that back button and go elsewhere. This is a huge problem but it can be an easy fix to lower your bounce rate. Stay away from drop-down menus and make sure your website has a clear search function if you have a lot of content.

4. Ditch Audio Advertisements and Pop-ups
Visitors don’t want to be greeted with annoying videos that start playing automatically, flashy animation or pop-ups for surveys or chat representatives. While some of these features are useful, the way they’re presented can drive away visitors quickly. Focus on a clean and informative design and offer these features in another way. If you have live chat, for example, place a call-to-action button at the header of your website so visitors can see it’s there without an annoying intrusion.

5. Use Internal Links
Use plenty of internal links to pages of your website to direct your visitors to relevant information. This is very important because there are many ways visitors may reach your website, not just through the homepage. Some people may find you through a link to your blog or they may be going directly to a product page. Internal linking is also a very useful SEO technique but only use it to link to relevant pages.

Absolute Web Services is a progressive Miami web design company that specializes in small business web design. AWS offers an innovative and unique approach to every client with services including logo design, custom web design, e-commerce, web hosting, Internet marketing and SEO.