If you are related to the world of digital marketing in one way or another, you must have heard about the bounce rate.
This specific term is highly important for websites, be it any industry or niche. Even, a bounce rate specifies the success rate of a website.
However, if you don’t have a clear understanding of the bounce rate and also if you want to learn ways that can effectively reduce your website’s bounce rate, just read this post.
In this post, we unleash the most effective ways to the low bounce rate of your website.
So, let’s begin!
The term bounce rate is extensively used in the world of online marketing. It is a major indicator of the overall behavior of visitors on a website. Most importantly, it is an important metric to track and monitor the performance of your website.
But there is no standard good bounce rate for every industry. It means the good bounce rate may differ from industry to industry. In fact, the bounce rate may vary largely depending on the ultimate goals of your business.
Hence, it is first essential to know the good bounce rate for your specific industry and only then you can implement ways that can reduce it as well as keep it low.
What does a Bounce Rate mean?
A bounce rate is specified as a percentage and showcases the total number of visitors on a website who left without clicking and viewing other pages of that site.
A website experiences bounce rate if a user clicks the icon for the back button, checks a new URL, visits the browser or if a page is open for too long but no viable action is taken.
It is very easy to calculate the bounce rate for a website. It is estimated by dividing the total number of visitors on a site who bounce back by the total number of visitors to the particular page.
For instance, if anyone of your webpage received 100 visitors and 70-80 of them leave the webpage without checking the other page of your site, then the bounce rate will be 70-80%. Usually, it implies that the lower the bounce rate is, the better it is for the website.
But this is not as simple and straightforward as it may appear.
Why Bounce Rate is So Important?
SEMRush conducted a study related to the bounce rate. In its study, it clearly mentioned that the bounce rate for any website is the fourth important ranking factor in Google search engine rankings.
It is because a bounce rate is a direct signal to Google’s search algorithms that a particular web page is not offering solutions or information that the searchers are searching for. As a result, the overall score and ranking of that web page are quite lower.
Moreover, since most of the searchers are unable to find a viable answer and solution to their problem, they tend to avoid that webpage and hence check for another relevant source for information.
By having a clear understanding of the bounce rate, you can know whether your content is engaging and effective to the visitors or not.
What is the Average or Good Bounce Rate?
There is no standard or average bounce rate, which can be stated for all websites belonging to different industries. The bounce rate differs from one industry or business to the other. For example, a bounce rate of 20% might be good for one industry but for another industry, it might be higher.
However, on a general basis, a bounce rate of more than 50% is considered very high and one between 20-50% is deemed low. Though a higher bounce rate is not necessarily a problematic or bad thing. It entirely depends on the type of your website as well as the channel, industry, and the devices people are using for performing a search.
For the blog page considered having an average bounce rate is believed to have a high bounce rate. The main reason for this is that well-written content does not completely satisfy the content of the user.
This can occur even when your web page holds strong call-to-action as well as internal links and when a large number of users are able to find the relevant answers they are searching for. For this reason, they return to the social media or search engine page.
For a blog post, a bounce rate between 60-90% is believed to be a benchmark average.
The other kinds of pages that can have high bounce rate are:
- Customer support and FAQ pages
- Contact pages
- New stories
- Checkout pages
- Pages confirming purchase
- Form submission pages
In order to check the bounce rate on particular pages, you can use the tool, Google Analytics.
Within Google Analytics, there is an option for ‘Behavior Tab’ where you can click the site content and then select all pages. From that particular option, you can easily categorize pages that have the highest level of bounce rate.
You can easily filter out the web pages that receive a huge volume of traffic in comparison to web pages that don’t get bulk traffic.
For websites that wish to convert visitors into potential customers as well as try to generate new leads, a higher bounce rate is not a great sign. However, it is also essential to take into consideration the other key metrics related to the user behavior. There can be other metrics, which you can consider such as time spent on a specific page, which is also a great way to estimate how the overall content of your website is performing.
In this case, it is better to avoid hitting any magic number and follow an effective yet long-term approach. Within this approach, you have to focus on enhancing the weakest pages of your site that hold the highest level of bounce rate.
Moreover, there are a few ways that you need to implement in order to enhance visitor engagement and metrics of your site.
Best Ways to Get Lower Bounce Rate for Your Blog
1. Try Making a Good Impression Right from the Beginning:
Most of the visitors leave a web page or blog in just a few seconds as they are not impressed with the overall design. Hence, it is vital to ensure, your blog is highly appealing right from the beginning.
For this, you can practice the following ways:
- Include simple and clear menus for navigation
- Use colors of high contrast for the background and font
- Create headlines that clearly highlight the benefits of content to the readers
- Break your content into shorter and understandable paragraphs using bullets, subheadings
- Make sure your content has enough white space
- Avoid auto-play videos, pop-ups as well as numerous ads in your post
2. Showcase Only High-Quality Content:
With so many websites available online, visitors have the option and easy access to rich content. In order to bring more traffic to your website and make sure that visitors read the content on your page, you need to offer high-quality content.
You can boost content engagement only by displaying rich content on the web page. If your web page does not showcase good content, visitors would prefer shifting to other pages. Hence, make sure you always create exceptional quality content always.
3. Improve the Relevance of Your Content:
The relevancy of your content is highly crucial for the success of a web page.
If any link to the content talks or discusses one thing and the visitor is looking out for another thing, it is likely to bounce. This way, the bounce rate for your web page will be high.
The main reason for this is that the reader loses his interest as you fail to deliver what is being promised.
Quality content needs some efficient planning to make sure it connects well with the audience.
4. Optimize the Meta Descriptions:
No matter what industry or niche your website belongs to, its Meta description will always appear below the URL of the website in search results. For this reason, it is of utmost importance to properly and correctly use the keywords in Meta descriptions.
Moreover, the content displayed for a web page must be in context to the Meta description. If the site content does not match well, it is likely to experience a high bounce rate.
Finally, use compelling, natural language and add target keywords in the Meta description.
5. Integrate Targeted Keywords:
It is also vital to maintain keyword relevancy for a web page. Avoid stuffing your content with keywords as this may attract the wrong kinds of visitors. This way, only the bounce rate of your website will increase.
An excellent way is, to begin with, the Keyword Planner tool from Google to determine keywords that can bring high traffic volume. This tool is free to use and is useful to discover numerous phrases and keywords, which are relevant as well as already receiving attention.
6. Improve Your Content’s Readability:
The content on your website must not appear like large chunks of information.
Rather, use subheadings, bullet points, and bold headlines. It is essential to break the text with proper white space, images, and relevant links.
Avoid including complex sentences and jargons as well as lengthy paragraphs to make the post easier to understand and read.
7. Make Sure Your Content Has Clear CTA:
CTA or call-to-action is extremely important. It is essential that CTA is well-positioned in the post. This encourages user engagement to a great extent and also entices visitors to sign up for the email or newsletter.
Moreover, the CTA must encourage visitors to visit the other valuable pages on your website. You must also pay attention to the copy of CTA, the color of the button and placement on the web page.
8. Focus on the Navigation of Your Website:
The navigation of your website is a key factor in engaging more visitors on your website. It is vital to ensure that the links on your website are precisely marked. Most importantly, these links must be convenient to understand.
Keep the navigation menu for your website smooth and simple so that it is easier for website visitors to reach on other pages of your website.
9. Include Internal Links:
It is essential to boost the overall time spent on your website. For this, you must look for related content to link so that website visitors have convenient access to the blog content.
This works in a similar way as the Amazon links work to related products and are linked to popular posts to boost website engagement. You must try to add a sidebar that features related content. It is highly engaging and boosts page views.
10. Include Videos, Graphics, and Images:
Visual content builds an emotional connection with the users. Also, it aids understanding. Hence, it is best to include visual content in your post. Don’t limit to only using images. You can also include infographics and videos in the content.
11. Use Pop-ups Carefully:
Pop-ups are highly useful, especially, when you wish to encourage individuals to sign up for the newsletter. But if there are too many popups included in your content, it can be annoying and distracting.
Therefore, use popups sparingly.
12. Use External Links for Opening New Windows:
If external links open in one browser, users need to click the back button in order to return to the website. However, visitors may get distracted, which can lead to a high bounce rate.
Therefore, use external links properly to open new windows in your site, which are relevant to the content on your website.
13. Monitor Page Speed:
If the page speed of your web page is slow, which is more than 2 seconds it leads to a high bounce rate.
14. Create a Mobile-Friendly Website:
Since a large number of customers use mobile devices to perform searches, so it is essential to ensure your website is friendly to mobile users. You can use a tool from Google to test the mobile-friendliness of your website.
On a Concluding Note:
By considering the tips mentioned in the post, you can easily reduce the bounce rate for your website. Once you have practiced all the ways, use the Google Analytics tools to measure the bounce rate of your site. With a low bounce rate, it is possible to witness higher conversions and more loyal customers.