10 Ways to Reduce Your Bounce Rate On Website
Accepting the fact that your bounce rate is high might be a tough pill to swallow. On the surface it might seem to you that your website has everything a customer would ever need but it isn’t that simple.
Bounce rate in digital marketing is one of the many factors that determine how your work is being perceived by the audience. If it is high for some reason and you’re not able to get your target audience to stay, there are always ways to rectify the situation to reduce bounce rate – starting from the basics.
What is a Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is part of the internet marketing terms glossary. It refers to the percentage of customers who leave a particular website without visiting any other subsequent pages.
The customers leave the site without clicking on links and basically, without performing any actions whatsoever. It is used to analyze how the traffic of a particular website is functioning.
How Does the Bounce Rate Affect Conversions?
The bounce rate has a negative effect on conversions. This means that the higher your bounce rates, the lesser conversions you are going to get and vice versa. Therefore, you need to make sure that your bounce rate is always as low as possible.
Many confuse the bounce rate as a measure of whether a business or website is doing well or not. While it does affect conversions negatively, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a website is performing poorly. There are other factors involved as well, however, reducing your bounce rate will ultimately help you only.
10 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate
Here are ten ways where you can know how to reduce the bounce rate on a website:
1. Keep the Page Load Time to a Minimum
Imagine this, someone clicks on your website’s link but then has to wait for ages for it to load. What do you think they’ll do next? Go to another website. This is why your page loading time must be kept at a minimum which in turn helps you with reducing the bounce rate on your website.
According to reports, it has been observed that every passing second costs you 7% of sales, and it results in a 16% decline when it comes to customer satisfaction.
2. Take the Help of Smart Formatting
When any page loads and you are searching for something, your eyes automatically search in the smaller paragraphs first or go to that list of bullet points. This is because, in this format, information is much more easily consumable.
Even if you put your all into research and have published quality content, if it is presented in huge chunks of text and the audience is not able to easily comprehend it, there is no point.
To reduce bounce rate for your website make sure you are doing these:
- Headings and subheadings to break down your content and make it easier to understand
- Take the help of listicles or bullet points like this
- Add images/videos/infographics for the audience’s benefit
3. Optimize the Placement of Call-to-Action
Optimizing the placement of call-to-action is one of the best tricks to reduce bounce rate. First impressions are truly important when it comes to websites since the visitor decides in the first few seconds itself whether they’re going to stay or not.
This is why your placement of call-to-action matters because it will help people in getting things done faster and at the end of the day, efficiency is key. Don’t make them question you and have a prominently placed call-of-action somewhere towards the beginning itself.
4. Ensure That the Layout Is Mobile-Friendly
Since most of us access websites using our phones. Therefore, you must make your websites mobile-friendly as it becomes very frustrating if you visit one using your phone and the layout is all over the place.
5. Create Content That Is Easy to Comprehend
Another extremely off-putting thing for a healthy bounce rate is content that constantly keeps you reaching for your dictionary, or is written in such a complicated way that it becomes hard to understand.
Keep it easy, concise, and stick to your point and explain things in a way that can be understood easily by your target audience to reduce the bounce rate.
6. Use Different Types of Content
People respond to visuals better than they do the textual form of content because it registers in their mind faster and is much more engaging. Along With videos and infographics high-quality images are also very effective in relaying information.
7. Keep Your Internal Links in a Logical Manner
Internal links refers to those hyperlinks that take the user to another webpage of the same website or domain. These are used to help in navigation and increase awareness about one’s content.
Notice that we used ‘logical manner’ in the subheading. This means that while we are pro including internal links in your work as they will provide a broader understanding and credibility to your information, there is a limit to their usage.
You need to make sure to use internal links in a controlled manner because over usage makes your content look shoddy and not very reliable.
8. Perform A/B Testing and Understand User Behavior
A/B testing refers to the process by which you can compare two or more versions of the same content to determine which one is resonating with your audience the most.
You can fix your bounce rate by performing these tests. The work that you put out on A/B testing will help you in understanding how exactly it is faring with your audience. Many times, certain elements of your web page such as the headline or call-to-action are not working.
Therefore, you need to conduct these tests to make sure that the content has no errors. It is all these little things that come together to create the effect you are aiming for, so make sure to never leave any stone unturned.
Further, by conducting these tests, you are also getting to know your audience better. Their preferences, what works and doesn’t for them and that is the most important thing.
9. Minimize the Usage of Sidebar Widget and Promotions
Most websites out there have one or more ads placed at various locations. Now, while these are a valuable source of income, overuse can affect healthy bounce rate and lead to a highly cluttered layout. This can immediately overwhelm your visitor.
You need to ensure never to go overboard with all the offers, ads, promotional content, and whatnot in the sidebar widget. If you do need to include something, do it in an informative way so that it adds to the page instead of making it look untidy.
Also, be wary of pop-ups and limit their use or if possible, do away with them completely since some of them tend to pop right when a visitor comes to your page. This can be very distracting which even reduces bounce rate for your website.
10. Enhance Overall User Experience
All the points that we have discussed till now are actively contributing to bettering the experience of the users in some way or the other. Similarly, user experience is all about making the user feel good when they interact with your website.
Your website should not just be easy for them to navigate and procure the required information but also be aesthetically pleasing. All of these together contribute to making your website to reduce bounce rate and making the user experience smooth and fruitful. Make sure to constantly keep working on it to provide a quality experience to your audience.
Conclusion
The ‘bounce’ away from your website should never deter you from doing your best anyway. If there is a problem, a solution is never far behind. An increase in bounce rate is not the end of the world, and the solution to this problem has been simplified to ten easy steps given above. To reduce bounce rate for your website make sure to implement them and see them through till the end.