How can you lower your website bounce rate?
- Community Futures Howe Sound
- Jul 3
- 4 min read
Every website and every webpage has a bounce rate. It’s yet another one of the countless metrics you can look at when considering the ‘success’ of your website.
But unless you’ve been working in digital marketing or SEO, it’s probably just another metric that you haven’t paid much attention to.
The good news is that bounce rates are easy to understand. Moving the dial on them can be the more difficult task – though it’s not impossible.
What is a bounce rate?
A bounce rate is a measure of how many people click on your website – then immediately click away again without engaging with your site at all. Essentially, it measures how well your landing pages engage your audience, with a low bounce rate suggesting that your landing pages do a good job of immediately engaging readers and keeping them on site.
You should be able to find your bounce rate on your content management system’s (Wix or WordPress, usually) analytics or insights tab.
A good bounce rate is generally anything under 40%. However, the average bounce rate is typically anywhere from 30% to 70%. Anything over that is considered poor.
Contrary to popular belief, bounce rates do not directly impact your search optimization scores. However, as a key indicator of how well your landing pages serve and engage your audience, they are still an important metric to consider.
That’s why a lower bounce rate is generally a great sign of a healthy website that meets the needs of your audiences.
Note: Some landing pages are expected to have high bounce rates, such as pages that include your opening hours. In these cases, customers may click on the site to confirm you’re open, then immediately click away again, as they have already found the information they’re looking for. You can disregard high bounce rates in these instances.
How to lower your bounce rate
As there are a lot of reasons why your bounce rate might be high, there are a lot of routes you can take to try to bring it down.
User experience improvements
Firstly, start by ensuring your users are having a good experience in a functional sense when they arrive.
For example, if your landing page is covered with pop-ups or ads, people may simply exit as soon as they have arrived to avoid dealing with the mess. Similarly, Google reports that 53% of people will leave a website if it takes too long to load – so if your website is slow, speeding it up can drastically reduce your bounce rate.
Keyword accuracy
Another common reason for a high bounce rate is bidding on keywords that aren’t an accurate representation of your business.
For example, if a bakery that sells chocolate chip cookies sees that ‘chocolate chip cookie recipe’ is a hugely popular keyword and bids on it, they will be bringing people to their website who are specifically looking for recipes. Upon arrival, visitors would immediately see they are only selling cookies, and therefore leave quickly.
However, the problem for many businesses is not that they are purposefully misrepresenting their products, but that their landing pages aren’t doing a good enough job of showcasing those products.
Perhaps the aforementioned bakery was indeed sharing their cookie recipe, but had hidden it down the bottom of the page where it was hard to find. There’s a good chance readers will give up and go elsewhere before finding it.
Therefore, make sure your landing pages get to the point immediately, are easy to read, and are clear about what they’re offering. Whatever the reason someone has clicked on your page, you need to ensure you’re answering their questions with your content.
Mobile optimization
Did you know that the majority of people use smartphones to browse the web?
That means that if your website isn’t optimized for mobile – AKA easy to browse on a smartphone – your audience may simply leave.
Be sure to regularly browse your own website from your phone to experience what it’s like for users, and ask friends and family to do the same. If it’s too hard to navigate, too slow, or has other issues, you can make changes to make it easier for visitors to navigate.
Pro tip: Google uses mobile data to determine your search rankings, so making improvements here can also boost your SEO.
Navigation issues
One lesser-known reason for a bounce rate being high is navigation issues. It’s possible that someone has arrived on your homepage with the goal of finding specific information about your business, or exploring a certain product or service.
If they can’t immediately navigate to those pages, they may simply leave instead.
Therefore, consider updating your navigation bar at the top of the page, or ensure there are clear buttons on the homepage that people can follow to view other areas.
People should quickly be able to navigate to:
Your contact page
Your information (including open hours and physical address)
Your key products and services
About information
If you have a lot of pages, consider adding a ‘search bar’ on site so users can quickly type in what they’re looking for
If everything is located on one big landing page, make sure there are buttons so people can jump to each section to avoid having to scroll through it all.
Ask your customers
If you have a good relationship with your customers, don’t be afraid to ask them.
You can either put the call out on social media, or contact a select few people you trust to ask for feedback. You can ask questions like:
Have you ever been frustrated by our website?
Do you have questions about our business that aren’t answered by the website?
Was it easy to navigate around our website?
It’s easy to miss obvious issues when you’re familiar with your own website, so a fresh set of eyes – especially some that are your audience – can be invaluable when making website improvements.
Get professional help
Community Futures Howe Sound exists to offer expert business advice for Sea to Sky business owners. Whether you’re struggling with HR problems, accounting issues, marketing challenges, or just about anything else, you can book in for a one-on-one free business advice session to ask for help.
And if we don’t know the answer, we can refer you to specialist consultants – also at no cost to you.
Learn more about our services here, or book in a free business advice session here. No strings attached.
Comentários