The aim of attracting people to your website is to get them to take action, whether that’s making a purchase, getting in touch, signing up for something or just leaving a comment. Active visitors like these are what you need to help your venture grow. When visitors leave quickly without any interaction it’s known as a bounce, and if you have a high bounce rate, it indicates there is a problem that stops them from engaging with your site. Here we offer some tips to help improve your bounce rate and keep visitors on your site for longer.
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Understanding bounce rates
There are currently two versions of bounce rate, both of which stem from Google. If you use the older Universal Analytics version of Google Analytics, then the bounce rate is calculated as the percentage of single-page sessions – in other words, the percentage of users that visited your site and then left without looking at other pages. If you have upgraded to Google Analytics 4, the bounce rate figures it provides are based on sessions that last less than 10 seconds, have no conversions, and have fewer than two page views. While these metrics are clearly different, they both, essentially, report levels of users not engaging with your site.
In terms of improving your bounce rate, the lower the percentage, the better, as it means your content is keeping your visitors engaged and you have more chance of achieving conversions. It also means that you are not squandering advertising budgets attracting people who don’t hang around. Additionally, search engines may take bounce rates into consideration when ranking sites as they are an indication of how relevant the content is for users. Improving them, therefore, could have a positive impact on SEO.
While low bounce rates are important, you should be aware that all web pages have people who abandon them, so don’t expect very low percentages. According to SEMrush, bounce rates below 40% are good . According to Backlinko, average bounce rates are between 41% and 51% . If you have pages with much higher bounce rates that’s an indication that you need to take action.
Tips to improve bounce rates
Attract the right visitors
The most obvious reason why people will leave your website quickly and without looking at other pages is because the information you provide is not what they are looking for. In this instance, there may be nothing wrong with your website or its content, but there may be issues with your SEO, in particular, the keywords you are using.
Search engines use keywords as a way to match the content of your website with the search terms someone is using. If you are not using keywords effectively or using the wrong ones, you might find your website is ranking in searches that have no relation to your business. What this means is that you’ll be visited by users who are searching for something entirely different to what your website is about.
To see if this is happening, check your Google Search Console reports to see what search terms your visitors are using. If these are irrelevant to your business, then that’s a signal that your keywords are attracting the wrong people. Remember to check where those visitors are coming from too – it might be that you have used the wrong keywords in PPC ads rather than on your website.
Provide a better user experience
Visitors expect modern websites to provide a good user experience (UX) from the moment they arrive. If they leave quickly, it could be a sign of a major UX issue that prevents them from using your site as they want to. This could be caused by a whole range of problems, such as unreadable fonts, clashing colours, overuse of pop-ups or too many adverts.
One common issue is that visitors leave because they can’t find what they are looking for quickly. This could be the result of poor navigation, such as a lack of clear headings, subheadings and calls to action on the page’s content; hard-to-find or poorly configured menus; not having a search bar for contents or products, and broken links to other pages. Checking for and rectifying these issues is vital to ensuring good UX and improving bounce rates.
For more information, read: 7 Ways to Make Your Website More User-Friendly
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
When checking bounce rates on Google Analytics, it is worthwhile looking to see if there is a difference between the mobile and desktop bounce rates. If you find that the majority of your bounces are from mobile visitors, then it is possible that your site doesn’t work effectively on smartphones or tablets. Fixing this issue is highly important given that most online searches are now done on mobile phones. Indeed, if you fail to address this, you could be losing the majority of your visitors.
The solution to ensuring that your site will display on all devices is to use a responsive theme that adapts to different screen sizes. When testing the new theme, make sure it works well on different types of mobile devices.
Improve loading times
Armed with high-speed broadband, 5G networks and the latest processors, both desktop and mobile users expect websites to load quickly. They also expect that when they interact with your site, it will respond swiftly. Because of these expectations, when users visit slow websites, they tend to abandon them, sending your bounce rate upwards. Indeed, if you research this online, you’ll find a multitude of scary statistics about the impact of slow loading on bounce rates, conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment rates, search engine ranking and sales. While many of these statistics differ, they all make the point that slow loading times are not good for websites.
You can easily find out what your loading times are and any issues that are affecting loading, by using the free PageSpeed Insights tool. There are also a range of actions you can take to boost your loading times. These include uninstalling unessential plugins, optimising images, minimising and compressing data, and using content delivery networks and caching. You can do many of these quite easily through your control panel or website dashboard, and there are also plugins that you can install that can do the tasks for you.
If none of these approaches has a reasonable impact on improving your site’s loading times, then you may need to upgrade to a more powerful hosting solution, like VPS, to ensure your site has the resources (i.e., CPU, memory and bandwidth) it needs.
For more information, read: 6 Signs that You Should Upgrade from Shared Hosting to VPS
Create content for your real audience
Even if your content discusses the subject matter your visitors are looking for, they are unlikely to hang around if they are not happy with it. This could happen for many reasons: your writing style might not be suitable for the audience you attract; the information may be too vague, too detailed or even out of date.
While rectifying this is important, the most vital thing to establish is why this is happening. The starting point here, again, is with Google Analytics. By checking out the demographics of your visitors you’ll get a clearer idea of who your actual audience is and can create content that is aimed specifically at them. For instance, if you have been creating content with older IT company executives in mind and then find that your actual visitors are 20-something amateur app-builders, then using a less formal and more conversational tone might keep them engaged for longer.
Other problems causing high bounce rates? Read: 10 Reasons Visitors Are Leaving Your Website
Conclusion
Bounce rates are highly useful for understanding how engaging your website is for the people who visit it. High bounce rates indicate an issue with engagement that can be caused by attracting the wrong people, poor user experience, errors with mobile friendliness, slow loading times and content that’s not right for your audience. From reading the tips provided here, hopefully, you’ll be able to identify any issues and take the right steps to fix them.
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