Your company's website is a vital component of a successful marketing strategy. Of course, it's not enough to attract visitors to your site. You also have to convince them to stay there, at least for a while. Otherwise, you won't convert prospects into leads and leads into customers.
This is where your bounce rate comes into play. Bounce rate is the percentage of website visits where someone only views a single page. When a lot of prospects "bounce" from your page without engaging further (clicking on a link, viewing more pages, etc.), then you almost certainly will have a problem with your site's conversion rates.
In this article, we'll discuss some relatively simple fixes that can help you lower your site or blog's bounce rate and start converting more prospects.
Determine What a Good Bounce Rate Is
First, it's essential to know what a good bounce rate looks like for your industry. Of course, an acceptable bounce rate will differ from one sector to another. For example, the average bounce rate for websites in the automotive industry hovers around 46%, whereas home services websites typically have a higher rate (approximately 52%).
Whatever your industry's average bounce rate may be, use that as a baseline to gauge your efforts moving forward. Then you'll have an idea of how well your website is currently performing and where you want it to be.
Causes of High Bounce Rates
Several factors could contribute to a high bounce rate on your site. Some of the more common causes include:
- Slow load time. Today's Internet users expect quick page load times and may bounce away within a few seconds if it doesn't meet that expectation.
- Poor design. If a website looks unprofessional, doesn't fit neatly on mobile device screens, or is difficult to navigate, users will likely bounce away from it without looking back.
- Lack of easy access to crucial information. Even if your site loads at lightning speed with user experience optimization, it may still suffer from a high bounce rate if you're not providing value to your audience - or making them work hard to extract the value that's there.
That last point is a crucial cause of high bounce rates across most industries. The fact is users will quickly abandon pages that they consider irrelevant to their search intent. You must develop a content strategy that aligns with your buyer's journey, including creating multiple landing pages designed to give each customer segment the most relevant and helpful information.
Fixing Bounce Rate
Now, let's talk about some fixes that can lower your site's bounce rate and help your consumers to move more quickly through the sales funnel:
- Ensure your copy is easily readable. You can accomplish this goal by (a) making sure that your copy doesn't contain a lot of unnecessary jargon and (b) breaking up blocks of text into smaller, "bite-sized" chunks for users who scan and skim content.
- Don't make disruptive pop-ups. Site visitors hate pop-up ads. Not only does it interrupt their train of thought, but it may also drive them away from your site before they even give it a chance.
- Make calls-to-action compelling. Your CTAs should be clear, direct, and action-oriented. Adding time-oriented words like "now" or "limited time only" may also induce a sense of urgency in your audience.
- Revolve copy around customer pain points. Once again, relevance is critical here. For example, if you're targeting an affluent demographic, you may want to focus on the quality of service rather than pricing since cost may not be as big a pain point for them as poor customer experience.
- Add new content regularly. A consistent posting strategy enhances your brand credibility and helps your site rank higher in search results.
- Optimize your keyword to target your core audience. This is SEO 101. If you want to attract high-value prospects to your homepage or blog, you must match your keyword strategy to their search intent.
- Make sure that you optimize your website for mobile. Your copy's typeface must be large enough to see on tablets and smartphones and that your website will scale adequately depending on the user's device. In short, your site must be "mobile-responsive" to be effective.
Keep Customers on Your Page Longer
Bounce rate is more than a "vanity metric" for most businesses. It is an important gauge of how successful your digital marketing strategy is and how your website is performing. Getting and maintaining a low bounce rate is critical for having a healthy site.
If you have questions about achieving that goal, an experienced media partner can help you. In any case, implementing the website fixes discussed above, you will likely enjoy a much lower bounce rate, increased traffic to your site, and more revenue coming in.
