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In today’s post, we’ll look at ways you can do to reduce Bounce Rate of your website but before that let’s take a look at what is Bounce Rate and how webmasters and site managers see the Bounce Rate. Bounce rate can be one of the more mysterious metrics when it comes to measuring digital marketing efforts.
What Is Bounce Rate?
It is generally analyzed in order to provide insight into how a site’s overall user experience is.
Google defines bounce rate as:
“The percentage of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).”
Essentially, this means that when a visitor “bounces” from a page, they have left the page and site after only viewing one page.
While this definition is pretty simplistic, the underlying cause of a bounce can sometimes be more complex.
Sometimes a high bounce rate can indicate that a user experience is poor.
However, at other times, a high bounce rate can be an indication of a positive user experience.
When you’re working hard to increase your site’s search performance, one of the things that you should do is to reduce a high bounce rate. In other words, a high bounce rate is a symptom that something is wrong in your strategy – you’re not attracting the right site visitor or the visitors coming don’t have a good user experience.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
Some websites might view a bounce rate of 80-85% as awesome, whereas other websites might see this as nothing short of disastrous. It really depends on your business goals.
Nevertheless, most webmasters pay close attention to website bounce rate as an overall indication of a site’s “stickiness” or appeal, and would like to reduce this troublesome number as much as they can. Some people might even think that bounce rate can influence your search rankings, via Google’s new machine-learning algorithm. So it’s obviously in your interest to optimize this metric.
Steps you can take to reduce Bounce Rate
1. Decrease time of loading.
Users do not like to wait for a long time. No one can be more impatient than a person who browses the web on a regular basis – he wants to get the information needed fast and without delay. If a web page takes longer to load, this tests his patience. Now that there are competitor websites with similar information that is readily available, there is no reason for users to wait long for a page to load – since they could get what they need somewhere else.
A website’s loading time can be reduced by optimizing its images and web code, as well as eliminating heavy scripts, plugins and widgets that are not needed.
It is also best for a loading message to have a timer or another indicator of progress. It is more likely for visitors to stick around when they know the exact time its takes to get access, rather than wait indefinitely for it to load.
2. Make it easy to navigate, access and read.
A website should be designed in such a way that is easy to navigate, so that visitors can access the information they need right away. When it is complicated in structure and the wording is hard to understand, visitors can get discouraged and move on to the next website they see.
In addition, website owners should see to it that they have legible text. It should not be so small that visitors will find it difficult to read, and yet not so big to look very unprofessional. To further enhance readability, the background and font should have sharp contrasting colors.
3. Go directly to the point.
The information provided should always be brief yet comprehensive. For visitors to stay focused, there should be no distractions and interruptions – like, for instance, a video (which is difficult to close) added above the content.
4. Keep your promises.
Visitors should not be lured in to get a copy if it cannot be delivered.
5. Interlink, recommend and relate
A website that is built around posts (like for example a tech info/ gossip theme) requires more time for users to view. Time can be extended by using elements that point to relevant content.
When a visitor lands on a page with an article about cleaning a particular computer virus from its system, this should include links to other articles exploring similar topics (like antivirus software).
Hyperlinks could be added within the post to explain the terms plus methods in the latest post, as well as a recommendation for a reading. In this manner, the post where a visitor lands on serves as a gateway to other web pages.
6. Add multimedia
This is fast turning into a world that forgets about the joys of reading. Aside from the cultural implications, this is not a good development in terms of the web. This is the time when text is the most repelling way to communicate. Nowadays, people would rather listen to music, play games and view images than just read plain text.
As a solution in terms of design context, web designers can make the content more appealing when it comes with an attractive video clip or related images. Since visuals can easily arouse interest and curiosity, they persuade visitors to read the text to get more info.
