Take a moment to think about the goals for your website. Is having a high bounce rate on your site a really bad thing? Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular site who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Understanding Bounce Rate
Specific goals for your website may not be to have visitors browse endlessly through a maze of content, but instead provide them with the exact information a visitor needs on the first page they visit. However, in most cases, high bounce rates can be caused by a whole variety of factors that can have a significant effect on your website’s ability to convert visitors into leads. The easiest way to enhance the fluidity of a website is to include call to actions that give visitors the opportunity to:
- Read more information on an additional page on site
- Fill out a form to acquire additional information
- Move to an affiliate or partner site
- Click to call your business or organization
- Buy a product through an eCommerce site
Essentially, if you have a goal that only require people to visit one page on your website, you may not have to worry about bounce rate, but for most, a high bounce rate poses threat to their online lead generation.
Improving Your Bounce Rate
Improving your website's bounce rate is really just a matter of house cleaning. It’s always good practice to routinely go through your content to make sure that everything is still in good condition, and doing so may help you find issues that contribute to your bounce rate.
- Add links to more pages within your website. Think about other pages that are relevant and useful to people that came to your site for a particular topic or inquiry. Link to other relevant pages that expand on information. Make it easy for visitors to navigate through your site to find the information they are most interested by including CTAs (calls to actions). Buttons that read something along the lines of “if you liked this, you’ll love this” may encourage visitors to continue moving throughout your site. The purpose of CTAs is to help visitors learn more about a topic that is relevant to their searched. The more valuable the information is that you are able link together, the longer visitors will stay on your website, and the stronger the influence our brand will have on that visitor.
- Go beyond product pages. A visitor may not be ready to purchase a product. Perhaps they are at the beginning of their buyer's journey and are still collecting information about what they need and how your business can help. Instead of just having the sales copy, include some additional informative links to product manuals, guides on how to use the product to achieve a specific result, customer reviews, and other valuable information. It may keep the visitor on the site long enough to make the sale.
- Improve your content. If you notice accompanying issues, such as a low average time on site (meaning people leave fairly quickly), in addition to high bounce rate, your content may not be providing what the visitor needs. Be sure to review pages on your website with high bounce rates and low average time on site in order to determine ways you could provide more information to improve your content.
- Reevaluate your audience and website visitors. You may have a clear target audience, but realize you are attracting a different crowd. Make sure your content reflects the preferences of your intended audience. Do they enjoy long, detailed posts., or would they prefer a quick bulleted list of important topics? Do they prefer videos over reading? Keep your audience top of mind when creating content if you want them to invest their time engaging with your site.
- Avoid Popups 70% of users said they found irrelevant popups to be annoying, resulting in them leaving the page without even giving your site a chance. That's not to say all pop-ups are bad - in fact, they can be a great way to generate new leads - but make sure they are used sparingly and appropriately.
A healthy bounce rate can lead to a stronger online experience for your website visitors. Not only will these tips help generate more leads for your business, search engines, like Google and Bing, will view your site as a reliable source for providing valuable and relevant information.