Your website’s bounce rate is a vital indicator of how well your site is performing. A bounce rate represents the percentage of users who visit a website and only view a single page before ‘bouncing’ off and leaving the site without interacting with it (no link clicks or form submissions) Understanding your bounce rate is an integral part of an online marketing strategy if you own a website. Pages with low bounce rates indicate good design and usability, engaging visitors to interact with your website. High bounce rates typically mean that the website is not doing a good job of attracting the continued interest of your site users.
What Constitutes a High Bounce Rate?
To fully understand your statistics and how they can help with the online marketing of your dental practice, you need to know what signifies a high or a low bounce rate. Obviously, the lower your bounce rate, the better. This means more visitors are engaging with the content on your site, and you are like to have higher conversion rates. SEMrush indicates that an average bounce rate is between 41 – 55%, and anything above this would be considered a high bounce rate.
Of course, bounce rates are not a one-size-fits-all approach. Rates can differ depending on the industry and between each page on your site. So rather than looking at your bounce rate as a figure alone, we recommend using your trends over time to pinpoint weaknesses in your site.
How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
- Optimise your homepage – The home page is the most important page on your website. It is the page which will be the most visible in the search results and have the highest traffic. A well optimised home page with a prominent contact form, clear navigation and call to action will be engaging to visitors and reduce the bouncerate.
- Clear and concise layout with an up-to-date design – Building on the aforementioned, a methodical layout with systematic content is more likely to engage users and feed them the information they require to make decisions. Up-to-date design reinforces branding and certifies your written word as professional and believable. Cliniquestudios found that 75% of people base a business’ credibility on the appearance of their website and 94% of people say that web design is a reason they mistrust a site.
- Engaging and innovative website copy – Majority of people visiting a website aren’t going to read all of the content word for word, they’re going to skim-read, looking for key pieces of information. You need to ensure that your content is jargon-free and information can be easily extracted. SmartBlogger reported that 73% of people would rather skim-read a post with an average of 37 second being spent on an article. The use of white space can help make your content more readable. Users are unlikely to read lengthy paragraphs, instead try breaking it down into smaller chunks and eradicating words which don’t add any meaning.
- Mobile optimisation and site speed – With half of all website traffic generating from mobile phones, it is essential to adjust your website content to ensure that visitors using mobile devices have an experience customised to their device. Simple changes such as making sure that layout is not compromised on a smaller screen and images are still being displayed with a high resolution and are not cut off by the margin will make all the difference.
How long has it been since your website last had a re-design? Have you tested your site on a mobile or tablet to check the layout? If your site’s bounce rate is higher than 60%, please contact us to see how we can help.
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