One of the key indicators of a successful website is a healthy bounce rate.
Encouraging users to click on your website can be a difficult task. It’s an even more challenging prospect to try and get users to stick around long enough to convert visitors into customers.
Now, before moving on I want to ask you a question… What’s the purpose of your website? Do you want to increase brand awareness, improve email sign-ups, or simply want to sell more products? Well if you’re website is struggling to meet your goals, it’s very possible your website bounce rate is to high!
If you are not sure what a bounce rate is, or what you can do to improve your website, don’t worry your local web design agency in Cheshire as you covered. We’ve put together five ways how you can reduce bounce rate and how you can increase conversions so let’s get started!
What is bounce rate?
A bounce is a single page visit when a user visits and leaves your website without any further interaction with your website.
Bounce Rate is data recorded directly from Google Analytics once you have integrated your website with the platform. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated when a session (such as visiting a blog post on your website) is triggered when a user lands on a webpage, but no further interaction is recorded before the user exits the website within a time allocation.
How to measure my website bounce rate?
Now, assuming you have access to Google Analytics, monitoring your website bounce rate is very easy.
On the left-hand side menu, under ‘Reports’, simply click on ‘Audience’ and you will be presented with a snapshot of data named ‘Audience Overview’ which will provide website data from the last 7 days, including bounce rate. If you wish to filter the data so you can see the last 30 days, three months etc, simply use the ‘Date Range’ to customize the data.
To also gain a better insight into the behaviour of your website visitors. If you return to the ‘Audience’ menu, you will see more filter menu options. If you click on ‘Behaviour’ then ‘Engagement’, you will gain more clarity on how long users are staying on your website.
#1 Optimise page load time.
Most digital marketers will automatically blame content for a high bounce rate. Well let’s take one step back for a second, what if the page takes so much time to load, the visitor has already abandoned your website before it fully loads? It still counts as bounce rate!
Did you know 47% of website visitors expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, with a further 40% likely to abandon a website all together if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Website speed has become a major contributing factor in mobile search rankings, and this trend looks set to continue. Any web design agency in Cheshire will now advice to invest some time in website speed testing, if you are unsure, read our website speed testing blog.
#2 Encourage related posts, products or services
Usually when a visitor is directed to your website from search engines, or by following links on social media, 90% of the time, it’s due to your blog post so you have already achieved the most difficult part by attracting the user’s interest. The next step is keeping them engaged…
By enabling related posts, products or services, you give your visitors the opportunity to explore more content, purchase more of your products, or understand your business a little better. By exposing your visitors to more content, not only do you eliminate users reaching a dead-end with no call-to-action action, you will also increase your chance of reducing your website bounce rate.
#3 Make your content visually standout
Long paragraphs of text can make your blog posts harder to read, and let’s face it just plain and boring! To stop users loosing interest by skimming content, then leaving altogether, make your content visually stand out by adding;
- Bullet Points to make instant, catchy statements
- Images to break up your text
- Headings to make sections of your content standout!
- Make facts, figures and stats come to live with visual graphs
- Add video such as a tutorial
- Related products or recent blog posts
- Search Bar
#4 Clear call to action
If you are struggling to increase website traffic, increase email sign-ups and attract more customers in your post, you will have a high bounce rate because you haven’t set out a clear call to action
Think about what specific action you want users to take when they have read your blog or view a product and make it crystal-clear what they need to do next. For example, if the purpose of your blog is to attract more newsletter sign-ups, add a sign-up button at the bottom of your blog post, or add a hyperlink to the contact page – make it as easy as possible for your audience to figure out.
#5 Proofread your content
Yes, you did read that correctly!! It is critical that you take the time to read over any website content, you could even ask for a second opinion, to spell check and make sure there are no really simple typo or grammatical errors within your page or blog posy content.
You get one opportunity to make a first impression, so not only will content littered with errors make you look unprofessional, it will become distracting and could even make your content unreadable leaving users no choice but to leave your website.
Bounce Rate Conclusion
So now we have highlighted several ways how you can monitor and reduce bounce rate, some methods will have much quicker results than others. Ultimately, some ideas will not work without high-quality, engaging content so it may also be worth visiting your content strategy, or look to trail-and-error different content writing approaches.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to our Web Grower Newsletter for more news, reviews and tutorials on the art of growing your website. Feel free to contact me tom@untitledtm.com to share your thoughts on website bounce rate.