Bounce rate optimization is a complicated process, and there are multiple things that you can do to reduce it. A good way to start is to ensure that your site is properly optimized for search engines and the user experience. This is very important because most of your website’s visitors will find your website through an organic search engine result or advertisement.
If you want to get the most out of your bounce rate optimization, you should try to ensure that your website is properly optimized for various devices such as computers, tablets, and mobile devices.
This article will share proven methods to reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions on your website. By following these tactics, you’ll be able to increase your conversion rates and increase your revenue.
But if you’re new to the subject, you are probably wondering…
What Is Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate is the total percentage of visitors to your site that leave your site after viewing only one page. Search engines and online marketers use it to determine how relevant your content is to your visitors.
Bounce rate is an SEO metric that describes what happens when a visitor lands on your web page and then quickly leaves. High bounce rates are usually a sign of:
- A poorly designed page that fails to keep the audience’s attention.
- An irrelevant page that fails to meet the user’s expectations.
Bounce rate is an important metric that measures the percent of visitors who land on your site without ever clicking on any of the internal pages they were redirected to. Therefore they don t even click on a submit button, a link, or any internal pages on the site they were directed to.
That means that without having a bounce rate, Google Analytics will not receive a signal from the visitor to your site, affecting your click-through rate and SEO rankings. According to SEMrush, bounce rate is one of the top-ranking factors that search engines use.
As you can see, your bounce rate is critical to your business’s success, so you must know how to measure it with the help of Google themselves.
Using Online Tools To Measure Bounce Rate
One of the best ways to find and analyze your bounce rate is by using Google Analytics.
So how can we use Google Analytics to help us track this metric? We need to have an understanding of what Bounce Rate means. In simple terms, it is the percentage of visitors who first visited your site but exited the site within one minute of their visit.
Therefore, if you want to track your SEO or know how many people are actually visiting your site, you need to check your bounce rate.
If you see high figures for a particular month but low figures for the rest of the year, then there may be something wrong with your design or web page structure. In most cases, you should adjust your web page structure to improve the bounce rate.
Understanding Google Analytics Reports
When you first enter your Google Analytics account, you’ll want to head over to the Audience Overview Report. There you will be able to see the overall bounce rate metrics.
However, it would be best if you kept in mind that the Google Analytics dashboard only measures one aspect of bounce rates.
To see the full picture, you need to check out the Google Analytics Content Detail report, which breaks the bounce rates down by individual URL and page. You can also check out the Channels Report, which will provide you with insights into each channel grouping.
This can help you gain a deeper insight into the problem.
At this point, you will probably be wondering what your bounce rate should be.
What Is A Good Bounce Rate?
There is no easy answer to that question. Most experts agree that a decent bounce rate falls between 40-45%, and a terrible bounce rate is about 70-80%.
The reason why there is no definitive answer is that every industry and location is different. To understand your industry bounce rates better, it is important to enabling benchmarking in your Google Analytics dashboard. This will give you a better range of where you should be compared to your competitors.
Now that you understand why tracking this metric is so important in SEO let’s look at some of the ways you can measure your website performance with Google analytics. One option that you have is to set up a Google Analytics URL shortener. You can also use a custom HTTP response code for each page (this is very similar to the custom URL option in Google Analytics), reducing the bounce rate. In my opinion, it is of very little value as it does not improve conversion or click-throughs.
Reasons Why People Are Bouncing Of Your Content Pages
Let’s take a look at the reason why people are bounding off your site.
I touched on a couple in the intro but let’s take a look at other reasons why a person might leave a site, including:
Slow site speed
Looking for better quality
Cant’ find what they are looking for –
Not mobile responsive
No call-to-actions etc.
The best way to reduce your bounces is to optimize your landing pages. By implementing the suggestions below, you will reduce your bounce rate, create a better user experience, increase conversions, and improve your SEO.
But before we go into the best ways to reduce your exit rate, let’s take a closer look at how to optimize for conversions because they both come hand to hand.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a technique for increasing the actual number of visitors to your site who, in turn, either convert to customers or undertake any other desired activity on a given page. If you can increase your conversion rate, you will obviously see a decrease in bounce rates.
CRO is optimized by testing out different elements of your website or a web page to find out how well they convert traffic to customers. Some of the most common methods used are web testing, list building, and split testing.
Web testing is the most basic form of conversion rate optimization and involves testing whether a particular web page is as effective as it could or should be. List building is used to build up a database of targeted visitors, which can then be converted into potential customers. Ad split testing is used to determine which elements are the most effective.
Now that you have a better understanding let’s take a look at how to reduce bounce rates while improving conversions.
How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Here are the best ways to reduce your bounce rate and improve your conversions.
Improve Your Site’s Speed
As you probably know by now, people have very little patience and are used to getting information quickly. You can get a website page speed analysis to see how it performs. You want to make sure that your website’s load time is the average time a page fully loads in under 3 seconds. You can learn more about why website speed matters to improve your site’s speed.
Create Quality Content
You only have a few seconds to engage a visitor, which can be done with an effective content strategy. By creating compelling content, users will want to stay longer. Focus on the UX, design, and colors. Add images and videos to keep visitors on your pages longer.
Make sure that your page layout is cutter free and easy to read with smart formatting. Use appropriate headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists. All of This will help create the engagement you need to lower your average bounce rates.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
By now, most sites are mobile-friendly, and if yours is not, then you might think about getting a complete website redesign. But there’s more to “mobile-friendly” than just responsive. You have to make sure that your UI looks great on all devices, from font size, image sizes to your buttons’ position. Make sure to test it for mobile devices with Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
Improve Your Site’s Navigation Structure
It’s important to have clear navigation so that users can find what they are looking for quickly. This means having an awesome menu where people can get an idea of your products or services, offers, and promotions. Use widgets to show reviews, awards, or partnerships.
But it also means providing methods so that users can find your other relevant content. By providing logical internal linking to related posts and products, a visitor might stay longer. Even if the page that they landed on was not exactly what they were looking for.
Think about user intent and guide them to your website’s important areas, which brings us to the final tip.
Create A Clear Call To Action
Everyone knows by now about the importance of having call-to-actions (CTAs), but using too many on a single page can be overwhelming to your visitors. The placement of CTAs is a strategic decision that must be tested on different devices. This can be done with different types of tools such as heatmaps, where you can see a recording of how people interact with your website.
Apart from having CTAs, there are a couple more things to consider adding to your website to improve bounce rate and increase engagement.
Exit-intent Popups
Even though popups can be pretty intrusive, they are an effective conversion optimization tool. Popups can help you keep visitors on the page longer and generate more leads at the same time. This can be easily done with a plugin like Convert Pro.
Just make sure that they are not too intrusive and that they are easy to close. There’s nothing worst than a popup where you can’t find the dang X.
Sometimes users can leave your site because they clicked on a link that you provided.
Opening External Links In A New Tab
Providing links to external pages is a good practice, especially when referencing a statistic or sharing a resource with users. But we don’t want people leaving our site, which can also cause an increase bounce rates.
Make sure that your external links open in a new tab so if the visitor wants to reference the other page; they can do so without leaving your page. This can easily be done on a WordPress website by checking the box in the dropdown of your link URL. You can also set all external links to open in a new tab globally if you use the Rank Math plugin.
Reduce Broken Links
Not only do broken links make your site look unprofessional, but they can also create a poor user experience and affect your search rankings. It can be difficult to track every single link, especially as your site grows, but you want to do your best to avoid having broken links, affecting your UX. You use Google Search Console to look for broken links.
Conclusion
I hope that this article could clarify the importance of reducing the bounce rate percentage of our websites. If you are still unsure of your website’s overall performance, you can get a free website audit report that will provide you with important insights.
If you find that there are too many issues to deal with yourself, please feel free to contact us for a free proposal. Our experienced team of website designers and SEO experts has helped hundreds of small business owners to close more sales and increase their revenue.
