When visitors view your website, do they take a quick look and hit the back button and leave? If you don’t know your bounce rate– you should find out.
Although the so-called BOUNCE RATE is currently less significant in terms of Search Engine ranking, it remains a factor you need to address. Any visitor to your site is valuable, and there are several simple steps you can take to keep your visitors where you need them – on your site.
A recent report highlighted the bounce rate percentage falls into five categories:
- 25% or lower: Check your website – there may be some technical issues to address
- 26-40%: The benchmark for an excellent performance
- 41-55%: Site performance is above average and may flag cause for investigation.
- 56-70%: Something to review
- 70% or higher: Warning! You need to address the potential problem.
You can view your bounce rate statistics within the ‘Audience Overview’ tab of Google Analytics.
IHS Note: Let us know if you would like more information on a website audit or a Google Analytics expert or view the Supplier Network.
The most common ways to keep visitors on your site are:
Fast Load Page Speed
Google is launching a May 2021 update within its Core Web Vitals launch, and USER EXPERIENCE is a crucial factor for ranking without getting too technical.
Part of that experience is the PAGE SPEED – in plain language – how quickly your site appears when a potential visitor clicks a link.
The slower the load time, the more likely you will have a problem bounce rate and deliver a poor user experience.
Quality Content
Are you delivering quality, engaging content on your website that provides that necessary positive user experience?
Quality content relevant to the search words or phrases used by your site visitor will help keep that visitor on your site, engage them with your content and brand, and ideally lead to a call-to-action where they contact you.
In turn, by spending time on your site, you deliver signals that confirm your content offers trust and relevance, and you are providing a great user experience.
You should check your site speed as soon as possible and where improvements are necessary, implement corrective action to increase load speed.
One easy way to increase speed is to compress the images on your site – large files will impact the load speed.
Remember that not all pages may be delivering high bounce rates. Identifying the areas of concern and addressing the problem is critical.
There are many tools available – contact IHS, and we will be delighted to help!
Quality Optimized Content
It may be obvious to say, but when was the last time you read or reviewed your website content?
Is it still relevant to the visitors – potential clients – you want to attract? Is it easy to read?
How up to date is the content? Is it conversational in tone or corporate-speak?
Can a visitor scan read? Do you use highlights or bullet points, or lists that are easy to consume?
Do you use quality images relevant to the page content?
Do you answer questions your audience may want to ask?
Creating content for web sites is an entirely different process from offline publication, PR or advertising content.
Site Technical Set-Up
You may not be an SEO expert, but your site designer or digital agency can help you.
To confirm your content is relevant to the visitor, simply adding a Title Tag and a Meta Description to your pages will help to ensure that visitors stay on that page as it is the content they are looking for.
You can review your metadata, the words displayed by search engines that should encourage searchers to click your link and improve as required.
Broken site links may also return a 404-error page or blank page – each of which will impact your bounce rate.
Links from other websites that send visitors to your site can also cause issues.
A more technical approach may be required to run a link audit to identify link issues both internal and external and to resolve any potential hazardous links on your site.
User Experience
Your site visitor is on a mission. They have searched and found you.
They have now visited your site to find what THEY are looking for. Consider how many distractions you may have placed in their way:
- Busy pages with multiple content, links and images
- Page navigation rabbit holes
- Pop-Up options
- Surveys
- Newsletter registration
- Subscribe options
Make your site navigation easy to find and follow and consider a search box facility.
Keep pages clean and relevant to the content on that page.
Use quality content to build your authority and relevance in your industry sector. Authority is a mark of expertise and develops trust in your brand, products and services.
Mobile-Friendly
Mobile First should be the mantra. A site that looks good and optimized on mobile will deliver good page load speed and user experience.
You can test your mobile-friendly status using Google tools.
Bounce Rate Summary
Hopefully, this article has helped you diagnose what’s causing your high bounce rate, and you have a good idea of how to fix it.
Make your site useful, user-focused, and fast – good sites attract good users.