Bouncing Back from High Bounce Rates – Top Improvement Tips

A high bounce rate can be a symptom of an ailing website. If your bounce rate is high, then your site isn’t retaining traffic well enough. This is problematic on many levels, as we will discuss here, but at its most basic level, it simply means fewer conversions. Of course, this is unacceptable, so we will also discuss the best practices to avoid the pitfalls that cause high bounce rates.

Website analytics track a plethora of metrics, but among them is bounce rate. This term describes the number of users who are hitting your website’s landing page and then leave after viewing only one page. No good when you’re trying to raise your conversions, right? Clearly, they can’t be checking out or digging deeper into what you’re offering if they’re only viewing a single page and leaving immediately. Keep in mind that bounce rates don’t always mean poor conversion rates, such as when visitors look for your business hours or address. If they come to the physical location, that could still be considered a conversion.

Typically, though, high bounce rates mean something is wrong. Your marketing efforts will be for naught if you can’t get and keep traffic. At its most directly harmful, the high bounce rate means fewer conversions and thus less income. This can spiral into less budget to tackle the problems that are causing the website snags, and soon you find yourself really struggling to lift conversions.

The good news is that the most common reasons why your bounce rates are high are easily addressed if you know what to look for—and the better news is that we’re going to tell you how to fix them!

The first step in dealing with high bounce rates is understanding them. How are they calculated? Analytics tools like Google Analytics will show you each page’s bounce rate, as well as the average bounce rate of your entire site. Additionally, Google Analytics will show you how many visitors your website has received, how long those visitors spent there, and which pages they visited. You can see if you have any outliers, either in pages that have strong engagement, or ones that are disproportionately raising your

The average bounce rate is between 26% and 70%, with a target number somewhere in the 26% to 40% range. Note that this figure is not the only one you should pay attention to, but instead is part of the data you should look at in total to gauge your website’s performance. If your landing page contains a phone number, email address, or contact form, you might still have a higher than average bounce rate because users are hitting that page, finding what they need to, and then converting through another form of action. In this case, you’re still ahead, which is why looking at all the data that Google Analytics provides is paramount.

In general, a low bounce rate helps your website because it means that users are coming to your pages and then staying there, or clicking into additional pages. This is a user engagement, and it’s what you want. It’s beneficial to your SEO efforts because it means your pages are offering quality material, building a profile of quality links and search results. When people find your page in the search results, and then spend time engaging with that page, analytics collects that data, and your website is primed to boost its SEO ratings.

Bounce rates should never be overlooked. This metric is one of the most important in determining how users are interacting with your page. Once you know whether people are staying on your page or leaving immediately, you can use that information in a variety of ways.

If you want to lower your bounce rates and improve your SEO results, a few basic practices will serve you well.

Faster Loading

Slow webpages absolutely kill traffic. Few things will cause more bounces than a page that doesn’t load. It’s almost worse than poor content in a way because slow website experiences practically drive visitors to your competitors. We live in an age of a thousand distractions and everything at your fingertips. If your page is slow, your would-be users will simply go to another site instead of wasting their time. Trust me, keeping your website fast and smooth is essential if you want to lower bounce rates and increase conversions.

User Experience

Similarly, make sure your pages have a pleasing, well-organized layout. Even if the page loads quickly, if the user cannot find what they are looking for promptly, they will leave. Attention spans are shorter than ever before. More alternatives exist than ever, so if you don’t want to be left behind, make sure visitors can do what they need to on your page with minimal hassle.

Something so simple as color in marketing plays a huge role in buying decisions—sometimes up to 90% of a snap purchase decision. These decisions are also made quickly, within a minute or two, of exposure to the product and the advertising. Making sure your website is aesthetically pleasing, with attractive CTAs and a layout that will keep visitors interested will help reduce that bounce rate.

Quality Content

Once the page has actually loaded its content, you need to make sure that the content is up to par. Again, competitors abound and attention spans are short. If someone came to your page for a specific kind of information, whatever it is, make sure it’s good. This is where a lot of companies fall into a trap of forgetting the customer’s journey. View your website as a user. Understand why visitors have chosen your website, especially if there’s something that sets you apart from your competitors.

Feedback data is also very important. If you can learn what your visitors like, you can tailor your content to engage them more. You’ll be guaranteed to see conversions rise the more you offer quality content that actually addresses visitors’ concerns, whatever they may be. Google Analytics is very good at detecting poor quality material based on user behavior, so trying to cram your website with “filler” is not going to work.

Take the time, put in the effort for good, engaging content, and be sure to analyze user concerns as well as their reasons for visiting.

Fine-Tune Metadata

With SEO, it’s imperative that your meta description actually matches the content of your tag. A greedy mistake many website developers make is trying to optimize for keyword clickbait without offering the relevant content. While this may seem like a way to get more visitors to your site, it will lead to a higher bounce rate. If you make sure that your title tag and meta descriptions are accurate and relevant to your page’s content, you’ll find your visitors stay longer and engage more.

Examine and Tune-Up Website Frequently

You should have someone visiting your website as a user frequently—especially if changes are made, but just to make sure that nothing has broken. Similarly to making sure that your page loads quickly, you need to see if links, forms, embedded videos, and everything else are still working properly. Two things that Analytics can show you are your visitors’ most popular browser and device configurations, so you can use those settings to really approach from your visitors’ perspectives. Your search results success will plummet if you have broken pages or other content, so be sure to thoroughly check your site for proper function.

Data changes. Seasons pass, new trends arise, or market conditions change. You may find that you need to update your pages frequently to stay on top of the latest demands, or people will find your website useless for their current needs and your bounce rates will skyrocket. A host of factors can play into your page rates dropping, so you want to be constantly monitoring what’s going on to stay on top of it.

Optimize for Mobile

This is key. More users are on their smart devices than ever before, and smartphone shopping is now just as prevalent as desktop browsing. Mobile websites require a different responsive setup than desktop pages do. While you can do the bare minimum for converting your site to a mobile experience, it pays to have this done properly. Mobile viewing simply has different needs than desktop viewing, so you want to optimize your pages for that format. You can deliver the same content, but if it’s not optimized, you’ll suffer from slower pages, poor layout, and a terrible user experience.

Once again, you will want to visit your own site on a mobile device frequently to make sure the experience matches your intent. There are tools for analyzing how mobile-friendly your pages are, and we highly recommend you use them. Mobile-friendliness is actually a key metric for Google Analytics, so
it pays immediate benefits to optimize your website properly.

Social Media Integration

When you’re trying to sell a brand, social media can boost your marketing efforts. Consumers are more likely to participate and build confidence when you have a strong social media presence. Brand loyalty, trust, and effectively free advertising via consumer identification of brand identity are all benefits of a strong social media presence. Be sure to not only link your business social media accounts but actually use them regularly. This paints the picture of personable business ownership ready to engage with customers, and it has positive effects on your conversions.

Even blogs can help interest consumers in what you’re doing, giving you a direct outreach. Rather than
relying solely on word of mouth, you can be proactive with the voice of your business.

Analyze Visitor Behavior

Heat maps, website recordings, and the myriad data that Google Analytics provides can all tell you exactly how visitors are using your website. If you find that certain segments of the page are not being used or maybe even actively driving people to move past them, you can make improvements. See what users are doing before they leave the page and use that to your advantage.

Conclusion

Bounce rates are a useful metric in determining your website’s performance. High bounce rates can lower your conversions and hurt your SEO, but some simple practices can help fix that problem. Keep your webpage as fast and relevant as possible to keep visitors engaged and you’ll see your bounce rates decrease into that target range. Be sure to study all the metrics to determine why your page is performing well—or isn’t—so you can address the issue quickly and easily.