9 Ways to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

What Does A High Bounce Rate Mean For Your Company?

High bounce rates mean that your site was not captivating enough or not performing optimally enough to entice the prospective customer to stay on your site and visit other pages.

Think about it, when you’re researching a new product to buy or service to hire, if you’re interested in a specific company, you’ll do a little digging around their site. Check out their other products/services, read a blog post or two, visit their About Us page, etc. If you’re not remotely interested, you’ll leave.

Can you “Fix” Bounce Rate?

Unfortunately, not every single person who lands on your site is looking for what you’re offering, so it’s virtually impossible to get your bounce rate down to “0”. However, you can continuously work to lower your bounce rate and increase the number of people who visit your site and stick around for a while.

What Should My Bounce Rate Be?

• 26 to 40 percent is excellent.
• 41 to 55 percent is average.
• 56 to 70 percent is higher than average (However, depending on the nature of your site, it may not be cause for concern.)
• 70+ percent is disappointing for everything excluding blogs, news, events, and similar topics.

Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

1. Make Sure Your Pages Load As Quickly As Possible

Nothing kills curiously and interest in a website faster than a slow loading speed. With each second it takes to load your content, the chances of a prospective client leaving your site grows exponentially.

2. Give Visitors The Information They Want

Visitors clicked on your link for a reason. If you tell a prospective client that “on this landing page, you’ll find XYZ” and instead you deliver XBH, the prospective client isn’t going to be happy and definitely won’t stick around.

3. Avoid Huge Pop-Ups, Annoying Ads, And Clickbait

Don’t distract your visitor with unrelated, obtrusive content. If they feel bombarded or attacked or distracted, they’ll leave. Simple as that.

4. Use Internal Linking

As stated above, bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. So, it’s only logical to include internal linking throughout the page to other parts of your site! Be strategic, though. The last thing you want is an entire landing page full of links. 

5. Site Design And Article Formatting</>

Make sure your landing page and site is visually appealing. This includes easy to follow layout, text divided by engaging photos and videos, bullet points, subheadings, helpful charts, an aesthetically pleasing color scheme, etc. No matter what your mother told you when it comes to websites, looks matter.

6. Mobile-Friendly Pages

Nothing turns off mobile website visitors faster than a site that isn’t mobile-optimized.

7. Site Search And Navigation

If you want people to visit other pages on your site, you need to give them easy and clear ways to navigate around. Make navigation intuitive and consistent so that people know where to find things quickly and conveniently.

8. Related Content Recommendations

Like this article? Here are a few others that may interest you! By suggesting other related content to website users, you are giving them a reason to explore the rest of the site. As soon as they click any of those recommendations, your sites bounce rate will decrease.

9. Make Calls To Action Clear On Landing Pages

Make sure it is 100% clear what you want visitors to do after they land on your page. Do you want them to download an eBook? Subscribe to your newsletter? Schedule a consultation? Whatever you designed that landing page to do should be copied in the Calls to Action.

Conclusion

Improving your bounce rate may seem like a difficult task, but we promise it’s doable. It’ll take time and a lot of work but if you can get visitors to stay on your site longer, you are increasing your chances of landing a customer.

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