How to Lower your Website’s Bounce Rate

Does your website have high bounce rates? Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the percentage of visitors who leaves after visiting a single page. In SEO, a high bounce rate is an indication that your website doesn’t provide what the user is searching for, takes too long to load or it is too complicated to navigate, and perhaps users are not well engaged with your content.

On the flip side, visitors may have found all the answers to their questions when visiting your page and didn’t see the need to visit other pages. Websites whose niche is providing specific and concise answers usually have high bounce rates.

Why it’s essential to reduce bounce rates

If you want visitors to spend more time on your site–browse content and establish a conversion, you need to reduce your site’s bounce rates. Any method that can effectively increase time spent on your website and boost page view numbers will directly translate to your website’s success.

The following is a roundup of the things you can do to reduce your bounce rate.

Provide excellent content
Is your content tailored for your target visitors and clearly presented? Make sure that your copy is free from grammatical errors and makes use of great images to grab their attention. Users should know what they could expect to find in the page and be led to a clear call-to-action for the next step.

Target the right visitors
Make sure that your site is attracting the right visitors by using the right keywords relevant to the content. Your meta descriptions should be descriptive and attractive to search engine users to click on.

RELATED: 5 Steps in Building an Effective Keyword Research Plan

Choose a simple, uncluttered and navigation-friendly layout

• Use quick navigation bars on top of the website.
• Search boxes should be easily accessed.
• Set external links to open on a new window instead of completely redirecting users off your website.
• Choose a responsive web design that works on different mobile devices and browsers.
• You don’t need to fill every inch of the website. White spaces are easier and less distracting to read.
• Group different content into different sections. In blog posts, you can use header tags to break up huge block of texts.
• Avoid reader fatigue and confusion by displaying statements, phrases or terms in bulleted lists.
• Use color contrast to lead your reader’s attention towards the essential part of the page.
• The overall web design should incorporate a great visual appeal that emphasizes your brand.

RELATED: Why It’s Time to Switch to Responsive Web Design

Improve page load speed
If your page takes more than 5 seconds to load, it will have a negative impact on user experience. Be careful with adding scripts, plug-ins and multimedia as they tend to weigh down your website and increase load time.

RELATED: Tips to Load Websites Faster

Remove distractions
Reducing these time-wasting distractions help lower bounce rates and improve your conversion rates.

• • Pop-up ads annoy most people so avoid using them (although there are cases where it can be effective)
  • Don’t run an auto-play video and audio content.

Do you have other ways to effectively reduce a website’s bounce rate? Share them in the comments below.