Maximise your website’s performance by minimising your bounce rate – we show you how.
Your website’s bounce rate is one of the key metrics you should be monitoring as you seek to improve your conversion rate. It is a sign of visitor quality and believed by some SEO experts to be included as a trust signal in Search Engine algorithms. Here are some best practice guidelines that can be applied to all websites to decrease the number of visitors exiting your site within less than 5 seconds upon entering.
What is a bounce rate?
As defined by Google, a bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik says for there to be a low bounce rate, there needs to be a strong correlation between customer intent and web page purpose
What is an average bounce rate?
Even companies with the best optimised sites will have a bounce rate sitting around 20% so a range of 0-5% is just unrealistic for most sites. There is no average or industry standard but Avinash Kaushik says that anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying. Even if you have a low number of visitors exiting your site upon a few seconds of entry there is always room for improvement.
How can a visitor bounce off your website?
There are several different ways that a visitor can leave your website and become a bounce rate statistic. These may include the following:
- Pressing the back button on their browser after entering your website
- Closing the open window or the tab.
- Typing in another website address on the browser.
- Clicking on a link to another website.
- The session timing out.
What can contribute to a high bounce rate?
There are several reasons for a traffic exiting your website in droves and usually it’s due to a combination of factors and not one isolated element. In conjunction with your marketing team, web designer and your SEO consultant, you need to look at your technical infrastructure, the website design, the content, the online advertising and the way you are optimising your website. These include the following:
- Your website did not look trustworthy or secure.
- Your website was sluggish or the pages were taking too long to load.
- The content was not compelling enough to hold the visitor’s interest.
- There is no clear call to action on the landing page.
- You are optimising your site for the wrong search terms.
- The content is not relevant to what the user was searching for.
- The visitor may find your website annoying such as background music, a video that starts upon entering the website or invasive advertising.
- You are targeting the wrong audience for your online advertising.
- A website has put a link to your website within their content that may not be relevant to the products and services you are offering.
How can you improve your bounce rate?
There is no easy way to find out exactly what is causing your bounce rate but if you find that there may be a few problems then they should all be addressed at the same time. It may not call for a total website redesign. You may be able to make a few minor tweaks here and there to your website to improve the spring factor. Here are just a few measures you may have to take:
- Analysing the optimisation of your website and whether you are using the most relevant and best keywords.
- Delivering what was promised – having a clear correlation between the keywords, meta data and on page content.
- Offering a clear call to action for customers to nudge them down the path of conversation.
- Addressing your external link building strategies and ensure you are targeting websites that are high quality, credible and authoritative but also relevant to your product and service offerings.
- Examining your internal link building strategies and ensuring that there are internal links within pages to help visitors navigate your website.
- Testing and improving the site speed.
- Evaluating the online marketing for the site both internally such as the popups, banners and so forth as well as external advertising such as pay-per-click advertising.
Give your visitors what they are searching for and minimise your bounce rate through highly-targeted Search Engine Optimisation techniques. SEO Works is a full-service SEO agency that can help you with keyword research, optimising web pages, creating landing pages, analysing the technical infrastructure and examining link building activities to help create websites with a low bounce rate and high conversation rate.
