Why Should You Care About the Bounce Rate?
If your website has a lot of visitors leaving after only viewing one page, it probably also has a low number of visitors completing a desired goal. A high bounce rate could mean that your website is ranked lower in search engines, because it suggests that people aren’t having a good experience on the site.
There are many ways to keep visitors on your site once you know the bounce rate.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
The phrase “good bounce rate” is subjective and can mean different things to different people. Some sites might see a 80% bounce rate as very good, while others might see it as extremely bad. It really depends on your site and business goals.
Despite this, many website managers and owners pay close attention to bounce rate as it is a good indication of a site’s overall appeal. They would like to reduce this number as much as possible. Some people think that a website’s bounce rate can influence its search rankings on Google, because of Google’s new machine-learning algorithm, RankBrain. It is in your best interest to improve this SEO number.
A Brief Note About the Problems with Bounce Rate
The next metric you should pay attention to is the “average time on page” metric, which is a measure of how long users spend on a given page on average. Because Google Analytics (and other analytics platforms) requires two clicks to accurately calculate Time on Page, it is an approximated metric, rather than a clearly defined measurement. An “entrance” click – typically the link click that brings a user to a page in the first place – and an “exit” click, usually a click on a navigational element that takes them away from a page, are both needed for an accurate calculation.
This crucial exit click is often missing from the equation, which is unfortunate. Have you ever read a page for a few minutes and then closed the tab or browser? Google Analytics would not be able to accurately measure the Time on Page if there was an exit click during that session. In this example, a user’s session is only logged as a “bounce” if they click onto a page and then immediately leave without taking any other action – even if they read the entire page. If a user clicks on a link in one tab and then opens that link in another tab, the first tab is still considered open even if the user eventually closes their browser.
The reason why bounce rate is not a good metric is because it does not provide good information.
Many marketers are finding that bounce rate is not a reliable metric and are instead focusing on “attention metrics” such as dwell time and scroll depth. Although it’s challenging to get a precise measure of bounce rate and Time on Page, it’s still worthwhile to try to keep your bounce rates low.
If you have an extremely high or sudden bouncing rate due to changes on your website, you have a big problem that needs to be fixed.
Bounce Rate Tips
Here are some tips to decrease your website’s bounce rate and improve the user experience:
1. Use Google Analytics To Analyze Your Site’s Bounce Rate
The first step in improving a website’s performance is to analyze its bounce rate using Google Analytics. You can compare the bounce rates of various web pages to see which ones are more successful than others. Once you identify areas that could be improved, make the changes and monitor your client’s digital marketing analytics to ensure the changes are effective.
2. Utilize A/B Testing
Once you know your client’s bounce rate, you will probably want to do A/B testing to see how effective different strategies are. A/B testing is a way of comparing two options to see which one performs better. You can test things like keywords, landing page designs, and call to action buttons to see which performs better.
A/B testing will help you see which version of your website is more effective by serving each version to a different group of visitors. This helps you determine which page is more effective. You should always track your bounce rate using Google Analytics to ensure that your tests are accurate.
3. Make Your Webpages Easy To Read
It is important to have a well-designed website, but you should also make sure that the text is easy to read and the pages are easy to navigate.
There’s nothing more frustrating for a user than a convoluted website that doesn’t have a clear design. This is one of the top reasons why users abandon a site before converting.
Font size is an important part of website design. It is important to use large fonts on websites, especially for mobile devices, as this can help to improve the bounce rate. If a website’s text is hard to read, people are likely to leave the page without taking any other action. There are a few things web designers can do to improve font size:
- Make sure your design can be easily viewed on different-sized devices by using a responsive design that will automatically adjust the font size based on the device being used.
- Style sheets should include larger font sizes for devices that need it.
- You can use an online tool to test how well fonts are displayed on different devices.
You should try to avoid large bodies of text, as they might be too much for a user to handle, and they will probably just skim over it.
4. Include Clear CTAs and Consider Their Placement
You should improve your site’s call-to-actions if they are not compelling. The purpose of a CTA is to get users to take a desired action, such as clicking on a link, signing up for a newsletter, or sharing on social media. Your text or button should be visually appealing and entice customers to click on it. It should link to something that customers would be interested in, such as a related post or a free trial of your product.
You should also consider the placement of your CTAs. If you’re not getting the response you want from someone, it may be because they’re in the wrong place. Most users make a decision about whether to stay on or leave a website within a few seconds, so it’s not likely they’ll search the page for a CTA. It should be immediately visible to users to entice them to click through.
You may want to engage the user with compelling content first, rather than throwing a CTA in their face right away, with the exception of blog posts. It may take a few seconds for them to be ready to take any next steps.
5. Avoid Using Pop-ups
Do you like it when you visit a website and are inundated with popups? Probably not, and neither do others. They make visitors uncomfortable and cause them to leave your client’s site, which makes the bounce rate go up. Many marketers believe that infographics are an effective way to engage their audience, but there are often better methods.
Four percent of consumers will respond to a popup ad, while 51 percent will respond to an email offer, according to Neil Patel. The statistics are convincing that popups are not an effective strategy and should be avoided.
If you absolutely must use a pop-up, make sure it’s an exit pop-up, and tailor each pop-up to the specific page it appears on. If they were going to leave anyway, it’s not likely to have a big impact on the bounce rate.
To better understand your website’s visitors, consider their motivations for coming to your site, what they hope to find, and how they interact with your content once they arrive. This information will allow you to create content that is more targeted towards your audience, resulting in them spending more time on your site.
6. Use Videos and Images To Engage Your Audience
Instead of resorting to using popups that can be annoying, you could try incorporating videos and images into your website pages. This could help attract your audience and convince them to stay on your site for longer. Nobody likes being confronted by an overwhelming amount of text.
Videos are a great way to engage website visitors and can be added to any page to capture their attention. If users are engaged, they are less likely to leave the site, which improves the bounce rate.
There are a few different ways to accomplish this task. First, you can embed videos directly onto your website. If you want to keep visitors on your site for longer, adding an engaging and interesting video is a great way to do so.
Social media can be used to post videos in order to improve a website’s bounce rate. By optimizing content for social media, you can increase traffic to your client’s website and keep users engaged once they arrive.
As long as the images are high quality, they can be powerful tools. If you want to use photos on your website, make sure they are high quality and placed in a good location.
7. Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly
Another way to quickly lose users is to have a website that loads slowly. Visitors to your site will most likely decide in a matter of seconds whether they will stay on the site or leave. If your website hasn’t loaded within a few seconds, users are likely to leave.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that can help you improve your website’s speed and performance.
8. Ruthlessly Optimize for Relevance
Some sites appear to be very relevant to certain keywords, but the content is only slightly related to the query, or completely unrelated. If a page isn’t relevant to what a user is looking for, they will probably leave that page. This is why it is so important that you focus on relevancy over everything else.
Once you’ve picked a target keyword, check to see that your page’s content is closely related to that keyword. Consider user intent when targeting keywords. The prospect is looking to learn about something or to buy something. What stage of the funnel are they in? What problem are they trying to solve? What questions can you ask to make your content more relevant to your audience? The more relevant your content is to users’ queries, the more likely they are to stick around once they’ve arrived on your site.
9. Use a Logical – and USEFUL – Internal Linking Structure
Many people believe that including multiple internal links in your content can help reduce your bounce rate. This strategy can be effective by providing Analytics with the second click it needs to accurately measure Time on Page. However, it can also make your content appear unscrupulous or low-quality. We’ve all seen sites that link to their own pages in every other sentence. This not only looks bad, but it also doesn’t do much to improve the user experience or provide audiences with something of real value.
This principle comes back to relevance. If your blog post is helpful and can be used to take action on a specific topic, feel free to link to it from other pages on your website. However, don’t go overboard with the internal links. This can make your visitors confused and overwhelmed (as mentioned above), and can also stop them from clicking on any of the links inside your website in the first place.
It is important to make sure that the internal links and anchor text are relevant to the topic and make sense in the context of the article. Do not link to every article on your website; only link to articles that will be useful to your readers.
