Bounce rate is one of the most important metrics for any website—the term refers to the percentage of total visitors who leave your site after viewing just a single page without clicking on any internal links or engaging with forms, buttons, or CTAs. Don’t worry if you’re staring at an alarming number though—we’re here to offer our expert tips for reducing bounce rate.
Make Your Content Easy On The Eye
When it comes to reducing bounce rate, a core principle of ongoing SEO, the devil is truly in the details—it’s essential to consider every aspect of how your website is presented to identify potential areas for improvement. One area that many businesses don’t consider is the readability of their content. If your customers have to work to decipher the words on your page, then they’re likely to give up in frustration. The same is true of your navigation buttons, links, and other feature elements—everything on your website should be clear, easy to read, and designed with comfort and accessibility in mind.
Consider Your Linking Strategy
If the goal of your content is to direct users to another area of your website—whether that’s to complete their purchase or direct them to further information about your products and services—a carefully placed internal link can be a great way of ensuring that. Additionally, there is sometimes a need for external links, to help inform your audience or to reinforce your marketing approach—but how do you include those without running the risk of increasing your bounce rate? If you add the correct HTML tags to your external links you can ensure that your windows remain open and accessible on your audience’s devices.
Speed Matters When It Comes To Reducing Bounce Rate
If you’ve ever grown bored or frustrated waiting for a website to load, then you already understand just how important this next point is—the speed of your website is vital to maintaining a low bounce rate. There are several ways you can improve the speed and responsiveness of your website, including eliminating unnecessary scripts, deactivating plugins that are no longer in use, reducing image sizes and more. For more information on site speed, check out our previous featured article on WooCommerce!
Diversify Your Content
One of the best ways to ensure your audience stays with and clicks through your site is to give them something to engage with—and creating standout content can be a great way to do this. To make it even more effective it’s ideal to have a range of content designed to grab their attention, this means videos that you can embed on the pages, and blog posts you can redirect your audience to using internal links.
Gather The Right Data and Reduce Your Bounce Rate
As important as it is to understand the best methods and tools for lowering your bounce rate—and we’ve only just scratched the surface here—the most crucial step you can take is to try and understand why your audience is leaving your site. That way, any methods you choose will be targeted to have a real impact. To do this, you need to gather as much data on your audience’s behaviour, this can be done through user behaviour reports or through a site heatmap.
For more information on how we can help improve your site’s performance, feel free to get in touch with a member of our marketing team.