How To Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

From the moment you start your business and build a website, you'll need to start to keep a close eye on your site’s bounce rate.

Knowing what your bounce rate is, and how to improve it, can have a significant impact on your business, and many companies today invest a lot of resources in lowering the bounce rate as much as possible.

What is a ‘Bounce Rate’?

First, let's clarify what a bounce rate really is.

A bounce rate is a measure of how many people left your website without viewing any pages beyond the page they landed on.

You can track the bounce rate for all of the pages on your website in Google Analytics.

A really high bounce rate can mean many different things, so it is important to take a closer look and understand where the problem lies. You may need to make your website and content more appealing, or you could simply be targeting the wrong kind of audience.

The Bounce Rate Factors

Google defines the bounce rate as the percentage of single-page visits, and a high bounce rate indicates that your website is not relevant to its users.

Here's how Google calculates your website's bounce rate:

(The total number of bounces on a page) divided by (the total number of visits to a page) times 100

So, for example, if at a certain given time your homepage has 171 bounces and 416 visits, the bounce rate will be about 41%. This means that 41% of the people who visited the homepage left without looking at other pages.

What constitutes a “good” bounce rate varies from industry to industry, though many consider anything over 40% bad, and under 20% good.

You should also consider where the high bounce rate is coming from and look at the bounce rate of specific pages rather than your entire website as a whole.

Articles, for example, tend to have a much higher bounce rate, whereas any page that is aimed at getting the visitor to take action should have a lower bounce rate.

Tips to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

When looking at your bounce rate, it is important to take in other factors, such as time spent on site.

This will help you understand where the problem lies. For example, if your homepage has a high bounce rate but users spend a lot of time there, it could mean that you have the right target audience, but the homepage is too confusing or filled with content to get them to take action.

If average time spent on site is very low, you could be targeting the wrong audience or designing your page in a way that doesn't appeal to them.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce your bounce rate on pages where it matters:

• Improve Loading Time: Users tend to close a website and move on if it doesn't load fast enough.
• Stay Focused: Design your site to support the main action you want users to take. Make the call to action clear and provide all of the important content the user will need in a clear and visually appealing way.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly so that you don't lose all those users visiting from their mobile phones.
• In pages with articles, provide internal links to related pages to keep the user on the website as long as possible.
• Analyse your SEO strategy and make sure you're targeting the right keywords. You want keywords that will send you high-quality traffic that is relevant to your service or product. This will improve your bounce rate significantly.

You'll notice an instant improvement in your conversion rate once your bounce rate improves because that means that more visitors will be clicking through the pages of your website and showing an interest.

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