Directing traffic to your site is one thing, but how can you ensure you keep people on your site long enough to turn them in to customers? The number of visitors that land on your site and quickly move on is called the bounce rate – the rate at which customers leave your site to visit another.

Here are our top ten ways of ensuring your traffic hangs around a little longer.

1. Fresh Content.
This is vital, fresh and unique daily content is a great way of not only generating traffic, but for building up information about your products and services. A good article should be around 500 words long, and relevant to your industry.

2. Teach.
If you can consistently provide your visitors with knowledge about a particular subject, they will start to value your web sites authority, and will likely return for the latest information.

3. Navigation.
You should keep the navigation on your site as simple as possible to ensure people can find their way around your site easily. Ensure areas are labelled clearly. You should also keep the navigation on the same area of each page within the website for ease of use.

4. Images.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Images can make a difference to the feel of your site, and when accompanied by an informative article, this makes your site look more professional and appealing.

5. Reviews.
Encouraging product reviews is a great way to get a community feel to your web site. By giving customers the option to hype a product for you, this creates trust for other users, and gives you an idea of what is selling well. If a particular product is getting a tough time of it, then it may be an idea to remove it.

6. Content types
You should separate sales content from general content. The majority of internet users don’t want to be forced to read a sales message just so they can find out about a product. It’s good practice to write a review then include a sales link at the end.

7. Landing page.
You shouldn’t assume that all your visitors land on your site via the home page. The majority of people will find your site via search terms, so it’s wise to make it obvious exactly where on your site the user has arrived.

8. Boredom.
With billions of pages on the web people have less and less patience than ever before you need to keep our pages light. 30 seconds is a long time to wait, and you’ll lose 90 percent of visitors if this happens.

9. Trust.
Your site needs to look trustworthy. If you have pop-ups and excessive flash banner ads, its highly unlikely people will trust your site with their credit card.

10. Security.
Ensure that if you are selling products from your website that you have a secure checkout and payment method. People are terrified of identity theft these days, and simple security verification can help put their minds at ease.

It’s very rare to get this correct on your first attempt, but tweaking areas of the site will improve performance over time. The key is traffic. The higher the volume of people looking at your site, the more potential there is for sales.