Good morning, Stephen Woessner here. I’m the CEO of Predictive ROI and the host of our daily podcast for business owners called Onward Nation.

Today I’m going talk to you about how to lower bounce rate by 20 percent or more in just two days.

Since the advent of the commercial Internet, over 20 years ago, I’ve collected tens of thousands of data points that have given me the ability to identify what I call the 8 Money Draining Mistakes. These are the things that cause a business website like yours to leak serious money every single day. Cash is being sucked right out of your business if you are making any of the 8 mistakes.

If you haven’t yet checked out my guide for how to stop making these mistakes (linked in the previous paragraph), please do, but today we’re going to dive deep into Money Draining Mistake #3: High Bounce Rate. We’re going to be talking about how to lower bounce rate by 20 percent or more in two days or less.

Bad bounce rate is the number one most expensive money draining mistake most people make in regards to their online business.

Bounce rate is the result of what happens when somebody comes to a home page — or any page within your website — and for whatever reason — they just leave. They look at your website and your message — they search for it — they found it — but they just puke in a bucket. They didn’t like it. For whatever reason. The people immediately leave — so they’re termed as “bounce.”

In the average unoptimized website, the average bounce rate is about 50 to 60 percent. To say that another way, between 50 and 60 percent of all the visitors we spend all that time to try to recruit to the site — through SEO, PPC, social media, and all the different types of ways we’re pulling traffic in — 50 to 60 percent are leaving immediately before they make one single click. This becomes very expensive and we never have the opportunity to convert those people into customers.

Optimally you want your bounce rate to be about 30 percent or less. Let’s assume that you have the standard conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent, and your bounce rate is 50 to 60 percent. If you lowered your bounce rate to 30 percent and still converted 2 to 4 percent of your now 70 percent of visitors, you’d increase your revenue by 42 percent!

If your bounce rate is higher than 30 percent, don’t worry. I’ve developed a way you can lower your bounce rate by 20 percent or more — usually in two days or less.

Step #1: Lower Your Bounce Rate by 10% Using the XYZ Method

The first step in order to lower your bounce rate is a process called the XYZ method that I learned from Darren Hardy in his High-Performance Forum. I liked it so much that we immediately put it into our process here at Predictive ROI.

It’s a rock solid awesome method for lowering your bounce rate.

In the XYZ method, we answer three questions for our clients. That’s “We do X,” X being the product or service, “For Y,” Y being the customer profile, “So they can Z,” Z being the resulting outcome.

Now that seems really simple. Any business owner should be able to say “We do X for Y so they can Z.” However, if you go to most business or entrepreneur websites, you do not see the XYZ statement clearly mapped out. A lot of business or entrepreneur websites scream “here’s me, here’s me, here’s me” — and far too little say here’s what we do — for whom — and here’s the resulting outcome.

Here’s the statistic. When a business owner defines XYZ — when they answer those three powerful questions — fundamental questions for their business — bounce rate goes down by 10 percent or more in two days, just by doing that. It’s that simple.

Step #2: Lower Your Bounce Rate by Eliminating Visual Clutter

The second factor that causes potential customers to puke in a bucket and bounce is clutter. Websites are often too cluttered — and like with XYZ — there’s another process that you can put in place to lower your bounce rate.

The Harvard Business Review published a great study in the January – February 2013 issue. The study showed how more choice actually leads to no action. Many websites give customers lots of options. It’s easy to see why someone might do this. When you present customers with more options — it would make sense that they’d find one more suited to them — but we’ve found that this isn’t the way online customers work at all.

When we take and study the home pages or content pages — we find that when there are 15 options — people take no action at all. A lot of websites have 15 graphics, photos, copy blocks, banners, or flashing things, but this isn’t at all what you should be doing. Instead of giving them 15 things to look at, give them three.

Step #3: Lower Your Bounce Rate by Giving a Clear Call to Action

After you’ve implemented an XYZ statement and eliminated visual clutter, there’s one more thing you must do. You must give your customers a clear call to action.

Why are you trying to get visitors to come to your website? What do you want them to do? Whether the next step you want them to take is to sign up for a newsletter, register for a webinar, or buy now — make it easy for them to take it. Your visitors are walking down an unfamiliar garden path in the dark with only you as their guide. You must point out each stepping stone to them as you go.

When you follow these three steps, when you give your audience your XYZ on a page without clutter and then give them a clear call to action, you will lower your bounce rate by 20 percent or more in two days or less.

In other words, when you give your audience a clear message, remove everything else, and tell them what to do — you will see a dramatic decrease in people who leave your website without doing anything.

Interview With Darren Hardy

Watch my interview with Darren Hardy, publisher of SUCCESS Magazine (see below) for more on how to lower bounce rate, including some of the other 8 Money Draining Mistakes that cause websites to leak money. One of the other money draining mistakes Darren and I cover is SEO keywords and how to rank on Google using keywords that matter. Onward with gusto!