When you analyse your business digital performance, it’s most likely that you would start with your website’s performance stats. These days, there are hundreds of various web metrics that you can get from web analytics tools. Sessions, users, page views and bounce rate are main top level web metrics that every business owner needs to understand when analyzing their digital performance.
In this article we’ll discuss ways you can improve your website’s bounce rate.
The bounce rate of your website can reveal a lot about your content, traffic, search marketing and website design. A simple website design fault or incorrectly targeting an audience when advertising can see your bounce rate skyrocket.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is an online marketing term to describe a user who leaves a website after viewing only one page. There are two types of bouncers:
Instant bounce – someone who leaves a website immediately, usually in 10 seconds or less.
Read and bounce – someone who reads all the content on the page and leaves without reading any more pages because their question has been answered. This type of bouncer typically spends 30 seconds or more on the page.
The second type of bouncer is fine and good for SEO. The instant bouncer however, can hurt your website’s ranking in search engines and impact your ad spend.
Looking to improve your bounce rate? Then follow these tips.
Provide a better user experience
People leave a website for many reason, one of the biggest culprits is a poor user experience.
With so much choice online, users have no qualms in hitting the back button if the website is not correctly optimised.
Improving your website experience by having a responsive layout, search bars and quick navigation all help to lowering your bounce rate:
How responsive and user-friendly is your website?
Improve website speed
As many as 25% of users will leave a website after 4 seconds if the page hasn’t loaded by then:
Not only do poor load times increase website bounce rate, but it also impacts your SEO. Your website speed depends on a number of variables including the content on your site and the quality of your host provider.
Create more internal links
An internal link is a word wrapped in a hyperlink which when clicked leads users to another page on your website. For example, if you want to learn more about search marketing you would click the hyperlink I’ve created leading you to a new page on our site talking about online marketing.
Placing several internal links within pages increases the likelihood users will view more pages reducing your bounce rate. Simply adding 2-3 internal links per page can see a double-digit drop in bounce rate.
Make use of widgets
Widgets are the sidebars, headers and footers on a website. They are separate from the body of a page and remain static on every page. For example, on the right-hand side of this blog post you’ll see:
- An option to sign up to our awesome newsletter
- An internal search bar to find more articles to grow your business
- Sitemap links to other parts of our website
Widgets provide users with options and additional steps to take on a website. Did you know we had an e-commence and email marketing category to our blog? Many wouldn’t know if it weren’t for our widgets.
Widgets are a powerful tool that can be used as suggestive props to navigate users around your website reducing bounce rate.
A high bounce rate is bad for business. If you use paid advertising your costs will rise as users won’t be making your intended action. Your SEO efforts will also be diminished as Google takes bounce rate into consideration when ranking sites.
Making simple changes today such as improving your host provider or updating the user experience of your website can see all areas of your online marketing campaign improve.
If you’d like to find out how you can improve your company’s website, now is the best time to get a complimentary consultation. Contact the team WebCentral and request your free web design consultation today.
