Getting more traffic and visitors is definitely one of your main goals, no matter the kind of website you have. Once you get the visitors, another goal will be to make them to take action, like to subscribe for latest posts, buy an item, fill out a contact form etc.
If your website visitors leave without taking any action, your bounce rate will reflect that and increase; and a high bounce rate, most times, is not a good signal and it adversely affects both your website SEO and conversions.
Bounce Rate?
This is the percentage of visits when people land on your website and leave without any interaction with the page in any way.
Bounce rate occurs when a visitor:
- Clicks the back button in their browser
- Closes the browser
- Experiences timeouts of session as a result of hosting error
- Types a new URL in the address bar while on your site
The truth is, having a percentage of bouncing visitors on your website is absolutely normal and cannot be avoided, however, there is a good and bad bounce rates. It is difficult to give a correct answer on what a good and bad bounce rate is because it varies for different business industries.
So, the question is, when should you start to worry about your bounce rate?
If your bounce rate is above 60%, then it is advisable that you carry out a thorough website and content audit and implement changes to decrease your bounce rate.
If your bounce rate is below 50%, then you’re fine, and if it is lower than 10% then you should feel free to rejoice and dance as hard as you can, but don’t relent – the work continues.
Causes of high bounce rate
Usually, a high bounce rate means that a visitor was unable to find what they were looking for. This could mean that you relocated the content they were expecting to find without implementing a redirect. Or probably, the content was never there in the first place.
Additionally, if your website is too slow or difficult to use or navigate through, it can lead to high bounce rate.
How to reduce bounce rate on your website
You now have some knowledge about bounce rate, let us see ways to reduce it on your website:
- Ensure your landing page is appealing visually
- Ask your visitors why they are leaving
- Optimize page load time: Nobody likes slow website
- Let your calls to action be clearly displayed
- Properly implement internal linking: linking to blog posts and relevant pages help to reduce bounce rate
- Improve user experience (UX) on mobile: if your website is not mobile-friendly, there is the possibility of losing a large number of potential visitors/customers
- Include on your landing page social proof and credibility like displaying customers’ testimonials, featuring logos or accreditation badges from professional associations and so on.
A high bounce rate is a vivid sign that your website landing pages don’t meet visitors’ expectations. Begin by checking the analytics tool of your website to ascertain which traffic channel has the highest bounce rate.
Then, proceed to analyse the loading speed of your website, content, mobile-friendliness and clarity of call to action.
