6 Secrets to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
If you own a website you can understand how hard it is to get visitors to your site. Once someone stumbles across your website you want to keep them on it as long as possible so they can explore what you have to offer.
What is a Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits where a person has left your website without interacting with the page. This means when they finally arrived at your website they didn’t click any links and progress to another page. Instead they clicked the back button and left.
What Does my Bounce Rate Say About my Website?
The lower the bounce rate the better as it indicates a high level of engagement with visitors. It means your visitors are interacting with your website and clicking links and viewing your content, exactly what you want them to do.
A high bounce rate on the other hand is considered a bad thing, especially by Google. If your bounce rate is too high then you can lose rankings as Google sees your page as not relevant to that search term.
How to improve your Bounce Rate
1. Don’t use a one page theme
If you’re using WordPress for your website then you’ve probably chosen a theme. If you have a one-page website such as long landing page it’s likely Google analytics will show you a high bounce rate. One-page themes can have problems tracking interactions and aren’t the best for SEO. So if you do have a one-page theme consider switching to something else at not only will it look more organised but it will perform better.
2. Use a mobile friendly theme
If your site is not responsive then it’s probably not optimised for mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones. This can cause a lot of your mobile traffic to leave your website if it the page doesn’t load right. A responsive theme will respond to the devices screen size and make the website more accessible for mobile users which is exactly what you want.
3. Improve website speed
If your website is very image heavy then your website could take a while to load and visitors will get frustrated and leave. By optimising the images on your website and choosing a fast reliable web host this will increase your website’s load speed. Optimising your pictures also saves you bandwidth and can increase your page loading times by as much as 300%.
4. Make sure you can search
If visitors can’t find something on the page they land on, the chances are they will want to search your website. If your search bar can’t bring up relevant results within seconds they will simply look elsewhere for the content they require. A strong site search solution will not only bring up relevant results but will also autocorrect any spelling mistakes. Having a good search function on your website is key to help visitors explore your content.
5. Make your call to action stand out
Your call to action is basically what you want visitors to do on your website. Depending on the website you have this might be purchase a product, sign up to your mailing list or liking your social media pages. Your call to action needs to be clear to visitors so they understand what to do. The best way to do this is to use clear big buttons and arrows to point to the relevant areas on the page. Without obvious buttons and arrows visitors won’t be sure what to do and you could risk losing them.
6. Add links to your posts
Interlinking between other articles and blog posts on your website is a great way to increase visitor interaction. Not only will it link to relevant content but it will keep visitors on your site longer. If you do plan on doing this on your website or blog, make sure the content you are linking to is up to date and relevant. Linking to content just for the sake of it is not a good idea as visitors can feel they are being misled and duped.
If you need further help reducing the bounce rate of your website then contact us today – We can use multiple techniques to help improve the performance of your current website or we can look at creating an entirely new website.
