In this post, we’ll try and understand the reasons behind a high bounce rate and what steps to take to reduce bounce rates for your website.
What is Bounce Rate?
Let’s try by starting with this simple example.
A lot of people go by restaurant windows every day. Some show passing interest. Only a few people show enough interest to make a stop inside.
Of these, some don’t buy anything and leave.
The bounce rate shows the number of people who come to your site but leave without interacting, but instead of a business, they do it on a site. Bounce rate shows you how many people visit your site, but leave without ever interacting.
It shows how many people feel engaged and close to your brand but not to the point of interacting more and extending that interaction with you.
Measuring and mastering the bounce rate is critical to improving conversions online.
Why Reduce Bounce Rates?
If it isn’t immediately evident if visitors bounce that’s a lost opportunity for you. We need to understand the entire digital journey people have on your site to understand the root cause of a bounce. You cannot simply send people to review pages and buy a product or have them book appointments with you without giving them space to learn more about you.
Even if you have thousands of visitors that don’t matter as long as you don’t get a conversion.
The bounce rate is the key to it. And bounce rate usually improves with better optimization efforts.
The page gives you a great first impression and that’s why you choose to stay on a site. Next, you need to create a need for people to explore the website further. You need to make the familiar with the offerings and take them close to conversion.
Users stay on the site longer and come back more. This leads to better brand awareness, loyalty, and sales.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
One can’t pinpoint an ideal bounce rate. You can be happy with a bounce rate of 75%. Another might be happy with 50 to 70%. A bounce rate of 90% or higher is cause for concern.
However on the landing page with just one call to action a bounce rate of 90% is normal.
6 Tips to reduce bounce rate on your site
With these points considered here’s what you can do to effectively reduce your bounce rates.
1. Try to understand why visitors are leaving so early
People enter your store looking for things and they turn up and leave. You should ask yourself what turned them away.
Was it the layout of your business? Did you build up an expectation before they arrived and that particular expectation wasn’t met? Are people who you’re attracting to your site not interested in the brand. For example, if people are looking for custom mugs and land on your page of latte recipes, it doesn’t match search intent. Answering these questions will give you enough insights on how to improve your bounce rate. That’s the reason it’s important to know your buyer persona and create website content that caters to this.
2. Design a better user experience
The questions on finding elements, tools, and others for improving the site’s experience should be on top of your mind. A good UX is a natural extension of a good site. It’s the sum of visual elements, information, and interactions. Designhill for instance uses plenty of images on their site to make people engage and stay for longer. Another great example is Jobber, who incorporates graphs, client photos, interactive maps, and other visuals into its HVAC Salary Guide for a good user experience. If you don’t have the time for creating a better UX, hire a virtual assistant for this.
Use the buyer persona as a reference to the site. How do they enter the site and what do they look for?
If a rework of the pages is in order do that.
3. Make sure your website is responsive
Living in the era of cyber crimes, when people have plenty of personal data online, visitors worry about website safety when visiting your website. However, you should also make sure it is responsive.
There’s a variety of new screen sizes and input methods. That offers a bunch of new capabilities that your site must be well-attended to.
A responsive site should be able to adapt to the new variants and should cater to them. A lot of the bounce requests boil down to people entering your site but when they face navigation that they’re not able to easily find.
4. Include a clear call-to-action
When looking at the bounce rate avoid anything that confuses visitors. This includes your call to action button. You should avoid cluttering your landing pages with multiple CTAs and make things clear and honest.
The majority of users decide whether they like the site or not depending on a single glance at the landing page.
Consider adding your CTA in areas that usually get the highest amount of interest so that more people click through.
5. Check the readability of your text
Web users have plenty of different options to choose from. If the content isn’t clear to understand it won’t sit well with people no matter how well it serves the search intent. Use bigger fonts and use typography that’s easier to read on desktop and mobile devices. Use headings, bullet points, pictures graphs, or charts to make this possible.
6. Build some landing pages
Another challenge with bounce rates is a page not serving a single purpose.
It doesn’t matter what that page is for until you send tome to optimize it for engagement. Think about the opportunities you have and optimize them for your leads and for the traffic on the site.
Concluding thoughts
What do you think of our post on optimizing your site’s bounce rate? Ultimately, a lower bounce rate boils down to creating content that speaks to your audience and helps them do things in a better way.
