Reduce your bounce rate and get a better Google ranking

By: Francesca Jolly

You may have heard the term ‘Bounce Rate’ in relation to your website and analytics. Your bounce rate plays an important part in your site performance, it is a good indicator of the behaviour of your visitors and how they engage with your site.

What is a ‘Bounce’?

When people click onto your website, you want them to stay for as long as possible. You want them to take in all the information and find the website relevant, engaging and specific to what they’ve searched Google for.

When a visitor comes to your site, if they do not see anything of interest within the first few moments, they are likely to quickly leave your site. This is known as a ‘bounce’ – when a visitor will immediately hit the back button and try to find another site that meets their needs.

A ‘Hard Bounce’ happens when a visitor leaves in less than 4 seconds, a ‘Soft Bounce’ is when the visitor leaves after a longer visit, without going beyond the page they initially entered on.

Why is ‘bounce rate’ important?

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can monitor your ‘bounce rate’. A high bounce rate percentage is a very good indicator that your visitors are not finding what they are looking for and not engaging with the site, steps should be taken to improve this.

You want your visitors and potential customers to be on your site for as long as possible, this will mean they take in as much of your content as possible and they are in front of your brand for a decent amount of time. This means by the end of their visit they are more likely to take the desired action, whether that is to buy a product, sign up for your service or make a new enquiry.

Reducing your site bounce rate is a great way to improve your overall performance and ultimately your conversion rate. It is also known to help with optimisation and where your site appears in the Google rankings.

Why have I got a high bounce rate and how can I reduce it?

There are a number of reasons as to why your site may have a high bounce rate;

Landing page design and functionality

An obvious point, but visitors may leave your site if there are site design or usability issues. This could leave visitors thinking that your website is not yet completed, or does not look professional. Make sure that your site functions well, looks right and delivers a slick, clear and concise message, this should ensure visitors can navigate your website effectively and easily.

Call to action

A strong call to action is a vital element for any site, it is crucial that the call to action generates the desired result, whether that is leads, sales or enquiries, testing different calls to action is an important process in order to get this working as effectively as possible.

Clear, concise content

The content on your site must be clear, targeted to your visitor and should give them exactly what they need to know as quickly as possible, try and avoid waffle. If the information on the page they land on is not relevant, or not clear enough, this can cause your potential clients to hit the back button, resulting in a bounce.

If the wording is too vague, or you are using incorrect grammar or jargon, then your visitors may be inclined to ‘bounce away’ from the site.

Most important information first

It might sound like an obvious point to make, but always make sure that your most important information is put first, this is in order to capture your potential customers attention, it is often worth looking at your logo and tagline as this is often where visitors will look first.

If the visitor cannot see this straight away, they may feel like they could find this information quicker on another website, don’t expect your visitors to hang around on your site trying to hunt out what they are looking for.

Keep it simple

Keep it simple, both the usability of the site and your content, the whole experience of using the site should by slick, easy and flow well so that visitors of all levels can easily use your site and get the most from it, it is often a case of less is more when it comes to website design, content and functionality.

As a rule of thumb a good bounce rate is under 60%, anything above this should be looked at, and steps should be taken to reduce the percentage.

If you need help reducing your bounce rate, get in touch with the team here at Total SEO, who will be happy to help you.