What Is the Bounce Rate? Helpful Tips To Reduce Bounce Rate.

What Is the Bounce Rate?

People who work in SEO are well aware of the bounce rate metric and pay close attention to this number. If you care about your website and the quality of the traffic, you need to understand about bounce rate and why it’s important.

A bounce rate is the number of people who come to your website and then leave without visiting any other pages on your website. The bounce of the website is measured in percentages.

Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. A low bounce rate means users didn’t leave your website as soon as they found it. Instead, they stayed and explored other pages because they found your website interesting and informative.

The opposite is also true. A high bounce rate means users who came to the website didn’t find content interesting or relevant. And rather than exploring the rest of the website they clicked back or closed the browser tab and disappeared.

How To Find Out Your Bounce Rate?

One of the easiest ways to see your website bounce rate is by looking at Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you two bounce rate measurements. One is site-wide and can be found as soon as you open Analytics.

The page-specific bounce rate can be found by looking at individual pages. (Google Analytics Dashboard > Behavior > Content > All Pages).

So why bounce rates fluctuate so much?

There could be several factors affecting your bounce rate.

One of the main reasons people leave is because your website is too slow or poorly designed. It could also be because the information on your site does a bad job answering user’s search queries. Another reason could be because the meta description is misleading and does not accurately describe the content that’s on the page. 

Bounce rates can vary depending on other factors such as industry category or business type. Typically B2B businesses have a higher bounce rate than B2C websites. 

Whatever the industry you’re in remember that high-quality content, well designed and optimized website is likely to result in a lower bounce rate which is what you want to achieve. 

Why Is Your Website Bounce Rate Important?

There are many reasons you should pay close attention to your website bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, it means the people are not finding what they are looking for when they come to your website.

A high bounce rate is a clear indicator that there’s something wrong. Often it due to the quality of your content, aesthetics and technical issues.

It also impacts your conversation rate optimization. If website visitors quickly leave the website, that means you’ll never be able to gain their trust and convert them into customers or subscribers.

Finally, maintaining a low bounce rate is important because Google looks at how people interact with your website. Whenever Google sees that there is a high bounce rate, it determines that something is not right about your website or the content.  This can cause penalties and a decrease in rankings. 

What Is Considered A High Bounce Rate?

Typically, any score over 60% is considered bad but there is no single definitive answer. The average bounce rate varies depending on what industry you’re in and the type of content that appears on your web page or a blog. post.

As you can see blogs and landing pages experience the highest percentage of bounce rates, but as you will see there are many factors that determine the rate of people leaving or staying on the website.

How To Reduce Website Bounce Rate? 

If your bounce rate is high, you should never ignore this information. You need to figure out what’s causing people to leave your website as soon as they arrive.
You need to analyze individual pages and figure out what causes your bounce rate to be high. You need to understand the reasons why people bounce or leave your website. Only after you understand why people leave,  you’ll be able to make the improvements.

Below is the list of reasons for high bounce rate and what you can do to fix them.

 Speed Up Page Load Time

If the pages take forever to load, its unlikely visitors to your website will want to waste their time going to other pages.

One of the first things you should do is look at the speed of your website. There are many tools available that will tell you how long it takes your website to load.  Use tools such as Pingdom and Google Page Speed to find out why your pages are slow.

Most of the speed testing tools will give you a grade based on the score.  (note: add screenshot).

Improve Your Website Design and User Experience

You only have a few seconds to capture user attention when they come to your website. If your website is poorly designed,  hard to navigate, and looks dated, many users will quickly leave leading to an increase in bounce rate. 

You can ask your users and conduct a survey to see what they think of your website.  You can also use a tool such as hotjar which records how visitors interact with your website. 

The design also plays an important role in determining how long people stay.

You need to use elements that make your website easy to navigate & content easy to absorb.  Include plenty of white space, provide a logical content hierarchy, Make sure the text is easy to read with high color contrast. Make sure your content is easy to skim and includes links to other internal pages within your website.

Create High-Quality Content

The quality of your content is one of the main factors impacting your website bounce rate. If you want to keep your bounce rates low focus on creating high-quality content that benefits your readers. 

Your content should have clear goals and answer questions your users might be asking. 

If your content is boring or does not provide useful information your visitors will probably bounce or leave quickly.

Ultimately, you need to create well-written, useful, relevant and valuable content people want to read and share. 

Make your text easy to skim and read

You need to make sure that the text on your website is easy to read on every type of device. This is especially important for tablets and mobile devices. These days most people access the web on their phones. If your text appears small and hard to read on a small screen, it will likely frustrate users and will make them leave.

You also need to break up big chunks of text and include images and other types of interactive content. 

All sentences should be fairly short and paragraphs shouldn’t be more than two or three sentences long.  Using bullet points and clear separation between different sections is another way to make the content easier to digest.

Add clear titles and sub-headings 

By splitting up content and providing clear and descriptive titles and subheadings you can help users quickly find what they’re looking for.  

If users can’t find what they need by scanning the headlines of subheadings they will likely get frustrated and leave. 

Add eye-catching images to grab user attention

If your pages are text-heavy and are not attractive, they will likely drive users away. No one wants to see a page with huge blocks of text with no visual cues.

By adding eye-catching images, infographics, and other visual elements you’re more likely to keep users longer on your website. And the longer they stay on the page and interact with your content, the more likely they’ll want to explore the rest of the website.

Add Internal links to related posts

One of the easiest ways to reduce the website bounce rate is to include links to similar or related posts. 

There is a reason why people ended up clicking on the link and coming to your page. If you include links to similar posts or articles covering the same topic, they will likely click those links since that’s what they’re interested in.

Write accurate meta descriptions

Your meta description is the text that appears underneath the link of the page title in search engine results. Even though Google does not use these tags to directly rank websites, meta descriptions still play a very important role in reducing a bounce rate.

Include clear call-to-action

Calls to actions or CTAs, tell visitors exactly what you want them to do and where to go. They should be clear and in no way misleading. 

If you know your audience and what they’re looking for you can create CTAs that they’re more likely to click. 

Make sure your CTA is highly visible and offer something of value. Who doesn’t want to get a free ebook or a helpful guide? 

Build trust with testimonials and social proof

Users are less likely to stick around if they don’t trust a brand.  By incorporating testimonials and other social proof elements you have a better chance of building trust and convincing them to stay longer. 

If for any reason the visitors to your website think that it’s not safe, reliable or credible they will quickly bounce within the first few seconds.

Conclusion

As you can see the bounce rate of your website is a very important metric you need to pay close attention to. You can never fully control the rate at which people leave your website. There are many clear and not so clear reasons for this. By analyzing your data and optimizing your pages you should be able to lower your bounce rates and get better results.