Understanding Your Website’s Bounce Rate
A bounce rate is a vital indicator of how well your website performs and is calculated when a person visits and leaves your site without interacting with it, e.g., clicking links or filling in forms. Understanding what your bounce rate entails is an integral part of your marketing strategy if you own a website. It can help you know what you are doing well and areas you need to target for improvement.
What Constitutes a High Bounce Rate?
To fully understand your statistics and how they can help you progress with your business, 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 engage with content on your site and are more likely to invest in your services. For example, SEMrush indicates that an average bounce rate is between 41 – 55%, and anything above this would be considered a high bounce rate. Similarly, anything lower than this would be a low 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 – Most of the time, this is the first opportunity for you to present a window to your business, so you want your homepage to be representative of your ethos and services. Displaying core business values is a sure way to establish ideas that will resonate with visitors. Your aim is always to intrigue users and get them beyond the homepage, which can be achieved through the use of calls-to-action (CTAs) leading to inner pages.
- 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 e.g., intensifiers such as ‘very’ and hedges like ‘maybe’.
- 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.
Overall, a website’s bounce rate is more than just a number. Has it been a number of years since your website last had a re-design? Have you tested your website on a mobile or tablet to check the layout? The most important thing about your rate is not to look at the number in isolation. Instead pay attention to the wider factors.
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