As you know, a high bounce rate is terrible for your website's success. But what exactly does this bounce rate mean, and how can you get it down?
Bounce rates are one of the most important SEO metrics for any Digital Marketing Agency, getting more and more attention in recent years. But what is a good bounce rate? What should you be aiming for? How have the bounce rates of top-tier websites changed over time? We'll take a look at these questions and more.
But what is a bounce rate?
Have you ever left a website after visiting just one page? In the world of analytics, this is called "bouncing" and the percentage of visitors who visit only one page and leave is known as the bounce rate.
When you visit a page on a website, analytics software tracks that interaction with a "session." If you click over to another page, it counts that as one session with two page views. However, if you visit a site, look around for just a few seconds, then leave for good, that's counted as one session with a one-page view.
Many factors affect bounce rate, some technical (i.e., if your site takes too long to load), some design-related (i.e., confusing navigation), and some content-related (i.e., irrelevant information).
Bounce rates can be high or low depending on the type of website. Businesses with blogs or pieces of information tend to see much higher bounce rates than those without because blog content tends to be long-form in nature, meaning visitors are more likely to read the full post or article and then leave the site.
If your homepage has a high bounce rate, it could be because your visitors don't like what they see right away and immediately click off your site in favour of exploring. Bounce Rate is a very important metric because it measures how relevant your content is for your website visitors. If your site has a high bounce rate, it could indicate that people are frustrated with what they see on your site and leave quickly.
How can you improve your bounce rate?
If you’re not measuring your bounce rate, you’re missing out on a key piece of information about how people are interacting with your business online. Why is that important? Because the lower your bounce rate, the better. Because a high bounce rate indicates a problem with your site's content or usability and if visitors aren't hanging around to see what you have to offer, they're not buying.
To check your bounce rate in Google Analytics, log into your account and select Audience > Overview from the left-hand column. Then look at the Bounce Rate section at the top of the page.
The first step to decreasing your bounce rate is to figure out why people are bouncing in the first place. Identify why people are leaving your site by reviewing the pages with an abnormally high bounce rate and the navigation paths leading to those pages. I
f you want to improve your bounce rate, start by making sure your content is engaging. If people are coming to your site and finding nothing of value, of course, they're going to leave! But if your content is compelling, educational, or otherwise helpful and interesting, then your visitors will stick around longer.
Your bounce rate may be high because of your copy, images and whether or not your content has a call-to-action (CTA). A call-to-action tells the user what you'd like them to do next. Often, website visitors aren't sure what to do when they land on a web page. If you don't give them direction, they'll leave your site and go elsewhere.
You can also do some simple things to improve your site's bounce rate, such as making sure your page loads quickly so people don't leave out of frustration.
Conclusion.
Bounce rate is one of the many factors that Google, Bing and other search engines use to determine a website's ranking. So it makes sense that you should care about it. It's also a factor that can tell you quite a bit about your audience.
Improving your bounce rate is a seemingly simple task, but it can actually be quite challenging when you get down to the nitty-gritty. It requires adjusting a number of different elements on your site and requires a good deal of work before you see results.
That said, once you do fix them, you can expect your site's bounce rate to decline and your conversion rate to increase significantly.