Bounce rate, everybody knows about it, everybody talks about it, but not many that actually know how to optimize it. You might wonder, what is this “bounce rate”? Why is it so important? Bounce rate is a metric that calculates how many times users visit a single page and leave without doing anything. This metric tells you how well people engage with your content. Lower bounce rate generally means better engagement. Better engagement means better conversion rate and of course better search ranking! This is what most business owners, and marketers that provide SEO services, including you should aim for. How do you achieve a good bounce rate? Read tips listed below to learn more!
Before we dive into how to achieve a good bounce rate, you need to understand the difference between high bounce rate and low bounce rate. Bounce rate will get higher when visitors have a shorter duration session, they visit a page and leave. A low bounce rate happens when visitors spend more time on your page and clicking available links. As we mentioned before, low bounce rate is generally considered better than high bounce rate, but it’s not always the case. A good bounce rate and a bad bounce rate are relative terms whose definition can change according to different criteria. For example, for a page which performance is measured by well it drives users to click another link, higher bounce rate is bad. But on the other hand, for a blogpost that its main purpose is to give information, then a high bounce rate is perfectly normal.
Generally, a bounce rate of 56% to 70% is on the high side, although there could be a good reason for this, and 41% to 55% would be considered an average bounce rate. An optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.
After considering all factors and you decided to lower your bounce rate, you have to pay close attention to things that negatively impact your bounce rate, such as:
- Slow page speed
- Excessive pop-ups
- Errors and blank pages
- Low-quality content
- Not mobile-friendly pages
Here are several things you can do to lower bounce rate:
Review Pages with the Highest Exit Volumes
Find pages with the highest exit volumes with Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages. This will reveal the pages where people most often abandon your site and let you know who is landing directly on an exit page or coming from another page on the site. Both kinds of information will help you make changes to improve your bounce rate.
Check Time on Site
To achieve deeper comprehension about your bounce rate data, context with other metrics are required. For example, you can do a cross-comparison with time-on-site metrics. By doing this, you can determine the magnitude of the problem, whether it is sitewide or just on a particular page.
Make Your Pages Easy to Read
It is common sense that a page full of type will get a high bounce rate. Change the typography, increase the font size, utilize whitespaces, break up contents into shorter and easier to skim paragraphs. Make it easy and fun for your visitors to interact with your page.
Optimize for Mobile
With more and more people accessing the web from their phone and Google also prioritizing mobile-friendly sites, you have no choice but optimize for this traffic. An eye-pleasing site will not do well if it takes a long time to load on a smartphone. Your visitors will get tired of waiting and find another source to satisfy their needs.
Include Clear CTAs and Consider Their Placements
If you have strong, optimized content on a page, you need to think about the kind of action you want visitors to take. A well-placed call-to-action should spark this action. Most of the time one or two CTAs are enough. Too many CTAs could cause confusion and turn people away. Also pay attention to the CTA’s button placement on the page, color, copy choice, and size is critical.