How to reduce Bounce Rate

Table of Contents

What is a bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the website after viewing only one page and not taking an action. 

How is Bounce Rate Calculated

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How to reduce bouce rate - Top 6 tips & strategies

Do you want to know how to reduce the bounce rate on your site?

High bounce rates can hurt your site’s conversion rates. when visitors leave your site before becoming subscriber or a customer means your business won’t grow.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of site visitors that land on your site but leave before viewing second page.

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Site Speed – How long does it take your website to load

Your site speed and performance play a large role in whether visitors want to stick around or not. The longer it takes for your site to load the faster your visitors will leave. Site visitors expect your site to load within two seconds and anything longer than that will cause to abandon your site and increases your bounce rate.

Your site needs to be fast to compete with competitors in organic search so to optimize your site’s loading time you may want to consider using a CDN.  Try optimizing your images.  Investing in higher quality web hosting, start keeping an eye on how plugins are affecting your site speed and begin using a caching plug-in.

According to researched data published by Google back in 2018, It took about 15 seconds average for a website to load completely. Which is far too slow when consider faster mobile site speed, helping users view more pages on the site, convert more, and buy more on most brand sites.

Google’s deep neural network, a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system – with a large set of bounce and conversions data. The neural network, which had a 90% prediction accuracy found that as page load time goes from one second to 10 second’s, the probability of a mobile site visiter bouncing increases 123%. Similarly as the number of elements – images, text, titles, on a page goes from 400 to 6,000, the probability of conversion drops 95%. 

How Increase In Page Loading Affects Bounce Rates - Zabiniazi

Match Search Intent

one important part of optimization that many people often overlook is matching search intent. The easiest way to explain search intent is with an example, let’s say you run some keyword research and found that “how to write a book review” has thousands of searches per month, decide write an article providing general tips for writing a book review and it winds up being on the first page of search results.

The article has a very high bounce rate why is that, well you missed an important step before writing the article, you should have done your own search for your focused keywords or phrase. if you’d searched first, you’d have noticed that the top search results are numbered  and easy to follow guides, not general tips like your article, that means that when users are searching how to write a book review their intent is to find easy to follow guides not just a general tips article. Always run your search for yourself and think critically about what users are searching for before writing an article.

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Clear Call to Action

Getting your site’s visitors to convert is a balancing act between asking for something but not asking for too much so you want your call to action CTA to be impossible to miss, enticing and as easy and as fast as possible for users to complete so you’ll need to describe what you’re selling to site visitors as soon as they land on the page. Make sure that you have a clear call to action so visitors know what steps you want them to take and in addition make sure you’re honest and clear about what you’re offering to prevent people from leaving right away.

A/B Test Everything

Performing A/B tests will help you identify website tweaks that you’ll need to make to reduce your bounce rate after all you may have a bounce rate because of something minor like the color of a call-to-action CTA button or the way your landing page is guiding visitors through the sales funnel. For example, after conducting A/B tests, I’ve called action button colors. HubSpot realized that 21 percent more people clicked on the red button than on the green button, now while this is an example of increased conversions due to button colors the thing is people have the tendency to leave your site if they aren’t compelled to click now. You can use google optimize a free tool from google that’ll help you run A/B test on your site.

Split Testing - How To Reduce Bounce Rate - Best Practices

Target Abandoning Visitors

sometimes people decide to leave your site no matter what you do, you can use opt-in  exit pop up to target visitors who are about to leave your site with a message designed to convince them to come back.  You can offer them a discount coupon to use on their next visit or get free shipping on their next purchase or gain access to exclusive content or download a guide that will help them to understand the value of your company and don’t forget to add a subscription form so you can capture their email address and target them in your next email campaign.

Use Internal Links Wisely

internal links are another way that you can get visitors to click further into your website but that being said you don’t want to overwhelm your readers think of internal links like a logical site map so if you mention something that you have more content about on your site somewhere else you  can link to it, that way you create a natural flow further into your website that visitors can follow.

Don’t overdo it, using more than one link every three sentences or so will make your content harder to read and it will overwhelm your visitors. Make sure you keep your links relevant, if a user follows a link and finds content that isn’t really what they expected based on the text of the link, then they’ll leave.

About the Author

Zabi Niazi - Director of Search Marketing SEM and SEO

Hands-on execution & Revenue-focused digital marketer with expertise in Design & Operations centered around people, processes & technology engineering a Demand-Gen Engine capable of delivering innovative experiences that tell the brand story and map to the buyer's journey generating awareness, acquisition, retention, and advocacy.