Understanding the bounce rate is essential for success of your website, such as; its relationship with conversions and sales and how you can reduce it.
With too many companies and businesses fighting for online visibility. No matter what, increased engagement is always the perfect way to checkmate your opponent.
Let’s suppose you are getting massive numbers of visitors daily but lots of them leave your site without interacting with anything. How will you feel about wasting that traffic? What do you need to do in order to reduce bounce rate and increase engagements & conversions?
A solid plan to reduce bounce rate is a perfect way to take great benefits from the traffic coming to your website and increase engagements & conversions. Let’s understand the concepts of bounce rate and then we will discuss how you can reduce bounce rate.
What is the bounce rate?
How to find the bounce rate?
Types of Bounce
There are three main types of bounce that affect your site;
- Hard bounce
- Medium bounce
- Soft bounce
1. Hard bounce
2. Medium bounce
3. Soft bounce
Keeping in mind all these bounces, you will now be curious about how you can overcome these. So you can prevent your visitors from bouncing from your site. So let’s know more about these bounce rates.
What is a Good and Improved Bounce Rate?
What is a good bounce rate for your site? First, you must recognize the difference between high and low bounce rates. A high bounce rate means your user’s overall spent duration on your site is less; they visit a page on your site and leave quickly.
A low bounce rate means users spend time on your site and visit other pages via available links.
In terms of good and bad, a high bounce rate is not a bad thing all the time. Good and bad bounce rates are respective terms whose definitions vary according to different scenarios. But in both cases, you have to try to reduce the website bounce rate and increase conversions.
For example, according to Google:
“A high bounce rate is terrible if your website’s winning depends on users visiting multiple pages. While, if you have a single-page site, or offer other types of blogs for which single-page sessions are required, then a high bounce rate is perfectly average”.
You can view this scenario from another perspective too. It is to think about a site’s basic structure.
For example, let’s check out an e-commerce site. Your main page may have a higher bounce rate than any other page. It’s because you want your visitors to spend time on landing pages where they can make a purchase action, just like the product page.
A few questions will arise in your mind, and one might be, what should be the good bounce rate for your website?
A bounce rate that ranges from “56% to 70%” is on the high side. Even though there could be a valid reason for this. And 41% to 55% would be the average bounce rate. So, a satisfactory bounce rate would range from “26% to 40%”.
Why reducing bounce rate is important?
- Your visitors that bounce from your site didn’t convert. Reducing the bouncing rate will higher the chance of conversions and get you sales. You can get higher conversion rates when you pause a visitor from bouncing back.
- Bounce Rate may also be used as a Google Ranking component. One industry study shows that Bounce Rate was nearly parallel to the first-page ranking. You need a higher rank in the search engine. You must reduce your bounce rate.
- A high Bounce Rate will let you know that your site has a problem with content, user experience, page layout, or copywriting. At this point, you need to revamp your site content, images, and page layout.
- You have to reduce the bounce rate of your website to increase your conversions and sales.
Why do visitors bounce back from your site?
There are some main reasons why your visitors leave your site. First, you have to ask yourself the following questions about your site. They are the following.
1. Am I targeting/Attracting the wrong audience?
2. Is Poor Website Layout & Content turning visitors away?
3. Is my Call to action performing well?
1. Am I attracting the wrong audience?
Now they need to target the right audience that might not be interested. Once they land on your website, they quickly realize they’re in the wrong place and leave immediately. This is the reason you have much more hard-bounce users than average.
2. Poor Website Layout and Content?
There can be four main reasons. If your ad campaigns are correctly targeted. They are;
1. If your site navigation is worst or menus are more transparent, well-intended users may leave after a few seconds of effort.
2. Messaging on your entry page needs to be more precise for visitors and live up to the promise of your PPC ads.
3. If the page loads slowly, your potential customer, well-intentioned visitors, will leave. No one will wait a long time to load web pages.
4. Also — if the page is generally uninviting — with a poor layout, lack of compelling visuals, or not offering clear information, visitors will quickly lose interest and leave.
2. Call to Action fall below the average fold line; therefore, most visitors are unaware they exist.
3. Banner blindness — there are so many ads and calls to action. That makes your visitors become blinded to the ones that convert.
4. The messaging on your Calls to Action needs to be more enticing or promising.
How to Redue Bounce Rate of Website?
1. Suggest Relevant Content
So rather than ignore your user intentions and let them go, you can put more content or categories in the sidebar section.
Relevant content will help them to explore more information they need before they leave your site. As a result, It will reduce the bounce rate of the website and help to increase your conversions.
2. Show Desired Content to Targeted Visitors
For example, visitors may find your article precisely what they desired and leave. Likewise, it is normal and expected for blog posts and other related sections. But that may not assist you with your bounce rate or conversions.
In this scenario, you want to show these your users the most relevant content. In particular, if a user arrives at a blog post related to cooking, your offer must be a recipe book instead of a fashion item.
3. Give Users Something Else to Do
This will take time for the user to stay at your site and reduce the website’s bounce rate. For instance, you can use WordPress Forms to generate a survey that displays before visitors exit.
4. Display External Media Onsite
But this can create too many chances for visitors to bounce to the social media page. Such as, they might see an attractive image from your social media and reach there by tapping on it. If your website was a single-page site, where your potential visitors land. This counts as a bounce even though they are heading to your social media.
5. Optimize Content for Search Intent
Another primary reason for users bouncing back is search engine result pages (SERPs). When users visit the link from a search result, they’re looking for a particular thing or information. As a result, they’ll bounce if they don’t find the relative answer or solution quickly.
You must optimize your titles, permalinks, and Meta descriptions according to your content.
Be sure to inform your potential visitors. You’ll burn them once and lose them forever.
6. Improve Your Website Speed
If your site doesn’t load above the fold section quickly, they might think a link is broken or out of patience and leave your site.
You can determine your site speed with tools like Google Page Speed and other paid ones. These tools will also give you suggestions for increasing your website speed.
You should do primary on-page optimizations to reduce the website’s bounce rate and increase conversions. Primary means optimizing your pictures, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and considering switching to a faster hosting provider.
You can keep your website speedy by using a CDN. But first, you need to find the right one for your sites and speed up your websites. So, users can immediately load the page. Then, before they exit due to frustration, show them what they want.
7. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Users
They will left immediately before taking any other actions. It will affect your bounce rate.
As you want to reduce your website bounce rate and increase conversions. You must ensure your website is responsive and easy to use on mobile devices; then, you can lower the bounce rate for handy devices. Consider creating mobile-friendly landing pages for your site to give a better user experience to your mobile users.
8. Make Your Text Readable
Your SEO-optimized content will also help you reduce your website’s bounce rate. Your text should be easy to read and fluently written. Some sites look nice but couldn’t be easier to read. The categories links are low contrast and lightweight. Even a banner shows the area’s best viewership on the desktop. However, that banner itself could be more challenging to read. It all creates a poor user experience, especially for mobile users!
9. Split Test Headlines and Page Design
Your content matches the user’s intent is necessary, but the headlines or call-to-action need to be clarified for them.
That’s why it’s essential to split-test some elements on your website. A/B split testing is; when you make multiple versions of a single page with different headlines, copy, images, social intent, or CTAs. Then you see which version performs better against user queries.
By doing this, you can reduce the bounce rate of your website to increase your conversion and sales. You can also create landing pages targeting different audiences, regions, and keywords.
Such as, if your audience is internationally based, you can identify the user’s location and show them a specific local landing page. Showing content to the user in their local language, currency, and cultural background will significantly improve user experience and can help improve your bounce rate.
10. Help Visitors Find Their Way
Ensure you reduce the website’s bounce rate by providing web content that answers the user’s question or gets to the point quickly.
If your landing page has multiple sections, you must add a table of contents or links that jumps to the most exciting part.
11. Match Call to Action to Intent
You must ensure that your CTAs are clear and match the visitor’s intentions. You need to improve the bounce rate of a website while getting user intentions.
For example, user intentions might be from four categories:
Informational: they want a particular answer or specific information.
Navigational: they’re looking for a significant site or landing page.
Commercial: they’re looking for products or brands with future intentions to purchase.
Transactional: they intend to purchase or accomplish an activity.
A user who might wonder how to clean football is unlikely to appreciate an intrusive pop-up selling new football.
Instead, at the end of your football-cleaning lessons, you could link to your post that reviews a brand of machine-washable football. While someone looking for that detailed review might be possessive about your affiliate coupons for that specific brand.
It all comes with understanding your visitor’s intention and ensuring all your content aligns with that intent. When a user finds their desired content, it will help them to stay longer and help to reduce the bounce rate of a website, they might get converted, and you count them as your sale.
12. Optimize Call to Action Placement
Make your CTA clear, soft, and honest. Misleading users can create the worst user experience, which is the central point for a high bounce rate and low conversions.
FAQs
A bounce occurs when the wrong audience reaches a page. It starts with how a page is advertised. Misleading title tags and Meta descriptions translate to poor targeting–the main reason for pogo-sticking and short clicks. Users will return to SERP to find a page that best satisfies their queries.
The average bounce rate is between 26% and 70%, with the best range between 26% and 40%.
It all comes down to the number of hits or interactions sent to Google Analytics upon loading a page in a browser. Remember that a bounce occurs whenever a session has only one exchange of the page view type – and nothing else.
It’s terrible for SEO. It affects your ranking in search engines.
Does Bounce Rate Affect Search Rankings? The bounce rate doesn’t directly affect organic ranking. However, it indirectly affects other ranking factors that Google cares about — slow page speed, low-quality design, poor mobile optimization, etc.
Pop-ups, for example, should be good for your bounce rates. They’re designed to allow users to interact with your site, which should keep your bounce rates low. But if they’re not developed the way Google likes, your bounce rates might be affected without you even realizing it.
Google Analytics referred to ‘bounce’ as a single-page session: a session that starts and finishes on the same landing page of your website without making another request to the Google Assistant server.
