Are you struggling to obtain leads and convert sales through your website? It could be that your bounce rate is too high. So, what is a bounce rate, why is it important, and what are some of the tricks to reduce bounce rate we recommend? Let’s take a look.
What Is A Bounce Rate?
A site’s bounce rate is a crucial part of marketing – it tells you how people are, or aren’t, engaging with your website. In other words, it tells you what is and isn’t working on your website. Say, for example, a potential customer is searching for local businesses on Google and your business pops up. They click on the link, but the link is broken and they are redirected to an error page. Bounce #1. Or, perhaps they get onto the page, but there’s not enough information on there and no links leading to other pages that could be relevant. So, rather than continue on the site, they exit instead. Bounce #2.
It is basically a reflection of the people who visit your site, but don’t go any further than the first click. And of course, if you want to get those sales, you need people to be clicking through your site.
What Is A Good Bounce Rate?
Essentially, you want to aim for under 50% for your bounce rate. That means, around 50% of people who hit your site from a search engine or other means, are clicking further through your site than that first page. Some businesses have a 30% bounce rate – so 70% of visitors are visiting more than one page on their website. It takes a lot of search engine optimisation (and the right content) to get there, but it can happen. A bounce rate over 70% is too high and your site needs some work.
You can find out your bounce rate by checking the Audience Overview tab in your Google Analytics.
Why Reducing Your Bounce Rate is Important?
It’s simple. If visitors to your site aren’t sticking around and moving further than the first page, that means they aren’t buying your products – and it can also mean they aren’t engaging your services (though this is harder to determine). If people are spending more time on your website, that means you are keeping them interested – and if they are interested, they are more likely to buy.
There’s more to it as well.
Reducing your bounce rate can increase your ranking with search engines. Although evidence has found bounce rates don’t impact your SEO and Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), website engagement certainly does. The more people are visiting your site, the more Google will take notice of you.
As mentioned above, reducing your bounce rate also means people are staying longer on your site. In turn, this means you have a higher chance of converting that visitor into a lead or customer. The more time people spend on your website, the more interested they are in what you have to say or sell. And the more interested they are, the more likely they are to become customers.
Reasons Your Bounce Rate Might Be High
Your pages are slow to load
Site speed is actually part of Google’s algorithm, but there’s more to it than that. Remember, your website is the first connection most people have to your business – and first impressions matter. When someone visits your site for the first time they’re going to be judging you, and if your site is too slow, the chance they will stick around or come back in future is low. To find out if your site is slow, you can run a page speed insights test through Google.
Reasons your site is slow can include too many large images or videos on the page. Keep your images at a good quality for online – 300 KB is ideal for smaller images on the page, and 1 MB is ideal for larger images. Any smaller than these and they may be pixelated, larger and it will impact your loading speed.
Your content isn’t relevant to your audience, or it is written poorly
Bad content isn’t going to draw people to learn more about you. Imagine you’re a copywriting business, and your website is full of spelling and grammar mistakes. Or perhaps you sell clothes, but your landing page talks about how much you love puppies. If someone lands on those pages, they’re going to click straight off again.
You need to have the right content, and it needs to be accurate and well-written if you want to attract customers. Make sure your content is optimised with keywords, avoids long sentences, has good internal linking and great call to actions. Pay attention to your analytics and find out which pages have lower rates for Time On Page and higher bounce rates, and visa versa. This will help you to understand the type of content you might want to avoid in future.
Inefficient content management systems
Your content management systems store all your web content in one place, allowing for updates to be made fast, providing support and helping you to create dynamic web pages. If you’re not using efficient content management systems, your website can look a mess and in turn, it’ll lead to high bounce rates. If your content management system is outdated, it could also mean your website isn’t portraying your business the right way.
A good content management system can make your website faster and lets you integrate your website with an eCommerce platform. It is also scalable and can handle large amounts of traffic in the event of an ad campaign, and it’s secure, which is more enticing for visitors.
Further Tips To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Now we’re down to the nitty gritty. You’ve established your bounce rate is higher than you’d like it to be, so now let’s talk about how to reduce the bounce rate of a website. We’ve already mentioned the importance of having the right content, search engine optimisation, internal linking, fast loading pages and an efficient content management system for efficiency and security. Here are some other things you can do:
Strategies to reduce your bounce rate on desktop sites
- Check your Google Analytics is set up properly. You want to make sure the tracking code is set up, that your goals and events are included, and that your plugins are connected to your analytics. A sure fire way to know how to reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics is to do your research first.
- Try exit intent pop-ups. When people are about to exit your site, have a pop-up set up that offers a special deal if they stick around, or a discount to sign up to your newsletter. If you don’t like pop-ups, there are other options available. For example, if you use WordPress, there is a Reduce Bounce Rate Plugin. The main aim of this plugin is to take visitors to another page on your site (or even your Facebook page) when they hit the Back button the computer, rather than taking them back to Google. There are no pop-ups, it simply redirects them.
- Include a translate feature if you direct your products or services at international audiences. Some people visiting your site may speak another language – by ensuring your web content is translated for them, you could gain customers.
- Along with internal links, you should also include external links on your page, but you want to make sure these open in a new tab. Make sure you never have them open in the same tab or people will lose sight of your website (and may not come back).
- Don’t have too many ads or auto-play videos on your landing pages or this could deter people from sticking around. They want to know about your products or services, but that doesn’t mean they want them to scream at them.
Strategies to reduce your bounce rate on mobile devices
- Make sure you’re using a responsive website design or theme for your website. Depending on which company you’re using for your platform, they will have some sites that are mobile friendly and others that aren’t. Always check, and change themes if yours isn’t working. Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test tool you can use.
- Consider using accelerated mobile pages – a coding project from Google that helps mobile websites to load faster. It strips pages down so that the essential parts are stored with Google in a cached version. Then when someone clicks on your site, they aren’t getting all your videos and scrolling screens show up – just the basics.
- Look at other plugins for mobile-friendly sites. This is another solution for how to reduce bounce rate figures for your website. Plenty of plug-ins are available that are designed to improve the mobile user’s experience on your site. WordPress alone has a few – including Jetpack, WP Touch and WordPress Mobile Pack. Check with your website CMS to see what’s on offer.
Essentially, if you’re not maximising your website’s potential, you’re minimising the number of conversions. You can have 500 visitors to your site every day, but if the bounce rate is 90%, you’re not getting through to them. Consider the above options, make some changes, and you’ll see improvements in your online presence, your finances and your morale. Get in touch today and find out how we can help you.
