You’ve spent months perfecting your website. You’ve honed and tweaked until you feel it represents your business beautifully, and gets across the message you hope will reach potential customers. Yet after all this work, as you study your website analytics, you discover that your bounce rate is frighteningly high.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. If this number is high, it means that a majority of web users who arrive at your site aren’t sticking around. The investment of time and effort into your website is lost if you’re not getting the significant returns you deserve.
Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to change this. With the right approach, you can maximise the likelihood that an individual browsing your site will turn into a paying customer. Here are some things to do to reduce that evil bounce rate.
Exceptional Content
First and foremost, your website must have outstanding content. This is one factor which is totally within your control and will ensure that your website delivers value and information to your current and potential customers. Your content should be engaging, polished, thorough, and perhaps most of all, be presented in a tone that matches your brand. With this in place, you’ll have a much higher chance of keeping site visitors around longer.
Ease of Navigation
Great content won’t matter if your page is a challenge for most users. Perhaps the information customers are looking for is there, but they simply can’t find it. Work with an experienced web designer to be sure the flow and navigation of your website is simple and straightforward. The easier it is to move around your site, the longer your audience will stick around.
Plenty of Internal Links
As you begin creating relevant content and introducing your products and services, create links from your own content to associated pages. It’s a smart idea to reference an older blog post, or to link directly to an item, gallery, or contact page. This makes it not only much simpler for your users to navigate the site, but leads them on organically in the right direction, towards making a purchase, contacting you for more info, or booking an appointment.
Consider Traffic Sources
Some things are beyond your control when it comes to bounce rate. Different websites and businesses experience variance in traffic based on where it is coming from. When your site is found through a search engine, for instance, it may result in a lower bounce rate, as a customer is directly searching for a particular keyword (and product or service). However, links on social media such as Twitter are often quickly clicked and scanned. This may yield a high bounce rate for that traffic source.
In fact, do you know what constitutes a bounce? When a user types in a different URL, closes the window, clicks on an external link, or simply uses their back button, these actions are all registered as a bounce. This activity can have a tremendous impact on how your website is being accessed, so it’s worth considering and researching different ways to bring traffic to your site.
Target Your Audience
Lastly, one great way to improve your website’s bounce rate is to more effectively target your online ads. Whether you’re using Facebook, AdWords, or another method, the best ads are not necessarily those that reach a large number of people, but that reach the right people. With market research, testing, and a deep understanding of your target audience, you can tailor your ads to reach the best customers who are ready to buy your product or service.
