5 WAYS TO REDUCE YOUR WEBSITE’S BOUNCE RATE

Before we jump into how to lower your site’s bounce rate, it’s probably best to manage expectations. No site, not even Jeff Bezos and the eCommerce behemoths, have a bounce rate of below 20%. If it’s zero or sub 20%, that usually means something in your site’s analytics are wrong, not that you’ve cracked the bounce rate code. Sorry, we know that might hurt to hear.

A bounce rate anywhere between 25 and 40% is considered very good, exceptional even. Most sites, even those hitting all the right notes and doing the right things, might still have a bounce rate of around 50%, which is still considered decent.

However, once we cross that 50% line, it might be time to take a harder look at your site. If you’ve recently discovered your site has a high bounce rate dragging it down, here are a few tips to help beat back that rate:

Getting someone to click on your listing on Google is hard enough. From there, the game is on to fulfill the promise your SERP listing made.

This is where having hyper-focused landing pages comes in handy. Search engine users have a lot of options to choose from to get the information they’re looking for. They’re not going to be willing to sift through your site, or landing page for that matter, to find what they’re after. Instead, they will leave and move on to the next listing.

To prevent this, make sure your site’s content gets right to the point and is engaging enough to hold interest. Having a good writer and web designer on hand to help you with this can be beneficial.

No visitor wants to be confronted with a giant wall of text when they land on your site. There’s a reason no one likes reading scholarly articles.

Instead, make sure your content is easily skimmable. This equates to good subheaders and short, easy-to-read sentences lumped together in quick, 2- 4 sentence paragraphs. This format is both easier to digest and more fun to read.

This one is probably the easiest and most effective fix on our list. On the bottom of your content, add a call to action. An appropriate CTA keeps visitors engaged in your site.

Maybe prompt them to read another related article, sign up for a newsletter, or even check out some similar products. Either way, the longer you can keep a visitor’s attention, the better.

It’s no secret that video always performs better than static images or text. While this may be a bit of an investment, marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

Your video content doesn’t even need to be a huge production, simply converting already existing copy into text-based presentation videos can be enough to make a real difference.

The best thing about video content? It keeps site visitors engaged without them having to do any extra work. Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s content. If you manage to get a site visitor to watch even just a 30-second video, that is already 5x longer than the average visitor.

This is a technical problem that a lot of sites tend to have. There’s no use having a huge piece of awesome content on your site if it slows down the page. Let’s be real: no one is going to stick around long enough to let it load.

If you have some media or images on your pages, make sure to compress them down. It also goes without saying that your site should be optimized for mobile, as well as desktop.