Ensure your website’s success! Learn how to improve your bounce rate

What is it and how to reduce the bounce rate of your website? Chances are, someone found your website and left it within seconds. When this happens, you will have a high bounce rate as a consequence, and this will not be beneficial for your website.

This same scene can occur in daily life when a person enters a store and leaves quickly, either because they did not like it or didn’t find the product of their interest. In the end, this type of event can be unfortunate both for that physical store and for your website.

Because of this, you must know some useful techniques to reduce your website’s bounce rate. But first, you need to learn what this is.

What is the bounce rate?

You may be eager to discover the techniques needed to reduce the bounce rate of your site. However, we want to tell you a little more about this metric.

Bounce rate is the total percentage of users who visit your website and who immediately leave without clicking any link.

When this happens, it means that a user has entered your website, but didn’t want to keep browsing it.

Besides, you can find this tool in web analytics and is one of the most important for web metrics. Thanks to the bounce rate, you can easily determine how higher or low is your website’s traffic.

What does the bounce rate measure?

The bounce rate can be measured by two variables:

1. Percentage of visits that have only spent a few seconds on your page.
2. Percentage of visits that have seen a page.

Google Analytics plays an important role when it comes to measuring the bounce rate since it takes into account the quotient of visits that have had access to a page, among the total of visits that the site has had for a certain time. Because of this, it doesn’t take into account the time spent on a website to make the corresponding calculation.

This indicator is very useful. After all, a high bounce rate may mean that some of your website’s elements aren’t working as they should. However, most often than not, this issue tends to raise some concerns. This happens because this calculation will also depend on your website’s type.

To easily explain it through an example, let’s look at the following case:

Blogs generally have very high bounce rates, but this doesn’t have to mean there is something wrong. If a user is looking for “Tips for choosing a luxury home”, they will look for a page that deals with that topic. When they reach it, they will probably read the information for 5 minutes and leave the page.

As a consequence, a bounce rate of 100% can be calculated. However, this figure does not mean that the user had a bad experience on this website. They just quickly found the information they were looking for and left.

What can you do in this case? 

Google Analytics has an option where you can insert a line of code to not consider a bounce for those visits that last a maximum of 30 seconds on a site.

Now, the bounce rate means that the lower your percentage, the better.

This means that to achieve the objectives of your website you must have a lower bounce rate to have a better quality of traffic.

In conclusion, sites with a high bounce rate will need to improve on some factors.

What should your site’s bounce rate be?

As we have just mentioned, the bounce rate will also be related to your type of website. This way, websites can have a low bounce rate that can vary between 40% and 50%. While blogs can have a bounce rate with a variation of 60% to 80%.

You must be wondering why the bounce rate is different on blogs and websites. And it is that in general, when a user enters a website, they do so by recommendation. For this reason, the user will navigate through different pages of the web in search of information. As a result, the bounce rate will decrease.

With blogs, something different happens. This is because the user will be interested in looking for certain information and they will only enter the blog that offers it to them. Then, after reading it, they will leave the blog immediately, and that is why the bounce rate is usually high.

After this explanation, we have reached the point that probably interests you the most. Now that you know and understand the meaning of the bounce rate, we will explain the best techniques to reduce it.

The best techniques to reduce your website’s bounce rate

Reducing the bounce rate should be one of the top priorities of your website. For this reason, we want to show you the most efficient techniques to achieve this. You may find out that you have already applied some of them. In this case, it is time to improve them to achieve better results.

How to reduce the bounce rate?

• Use the white space as a guide for the user

What is white space? If you are not familiar with this term, you should know that it is very useful to guide the user. For you to reduce the bounce rate using this option, you shouldn’t add many graphic elements on your site so as not to mislead the user.

Using way too many graphic elements just to fill space isn’t worth it. Because of this, there’s nothing better than guiding your users through a blank space or background. A classic example is Google itself. Once you open your browser, you’re greeted by its search bar in a white background. Said background allows Google to not distract the user from what they want to search and find.

So, to guide your audience through all the content on your page don’t forget to use white space.

• Your website’s content must be easy to read

As a website owner, your main goal must be to make users choose you over the competition. After all, the internet is full of it and there are thousands of sites with the same topic.

So, to reduce your bounce rate, you need to create easy-to-read content. In this sense, many reasons can affect the readability of your website’s text. Because of this, you should be cautious with some elements such as the size of the font.

Line spacing is also another element you must keep in tune with the typography. Only in this way can the user find a pleasant reading on your website. Besides, your user shouldn’t need to make a visual effort to read your content.

Now, to offer high-quality content, you also need to create breaks. This way, you will allow the reader to rest between sections. For this, you must leave some spaces between the paragraphs. Once you have a well-structured text on your site, your readers won’t be able to take their eyes off of it. 

What tricks can you use to make your content more readable? 

• Structure your blog efficiently by adding captions.
• Use bullets points
• Highlight keywords by writing them in bold.
• Include questions directed to the user, so that they can be integrated into the text.
• Illustrate your texts visually, adding images and graphics.

• Attach internal links frequently

Internal links are very important. It’s also a good practice to improve your SEO positioning and of course, to lower your bounce rate efficiently.

But what are internal links? These links are the ones that go from your website to another page on your website, and without the need to leave it. When you do not add an internal link on your website, your users will need to manually look them the information they’re looking for. This, of course, can be very annoying to them, especially when it can be avoided.

The opposite will happen, if you have links on your website as you will be able to keep the user for much longer on your website. Regarding the probabilities, instead of clicking directly on the menu, they will prefer to click on an internal link. And as extra tips we can tell you make each internal link open in a new tab, this way the user will stay focused on what they’re reading.

• Use a strategic plan to add your pop-ups

Pop-ups turn out to be very advantageous for your website since they can generate higher sales. However, for the result to be positive, you must know how to use them strategically. You must take this point into account since by misusing pop-ups your bounce rate could increase.

To use pop-ups properly, they should be added on some pages of your site and preferably when the visitor has already been browsing for approximately 40 seconds. It could also be included when the user moves the mouse over to the “close” tab.

You must prevent the audience from encountering this element as soon as they enter your website, or else they will leave your page at once.

• Your website must have a fast-loading speed 

Users will find your website annoying if it takes too long to load. It’s useless to have a striking site that takes hours to load. In fact, most users on the internet find it very annoying to enter a site that takes a long time to load because it makes them waste their time.

So, the faster your website can load, the lower your bounce rate will be.

Even as a curious fact we can say that when a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, up to 40% of traffic can be lost. Do you want this to happen on your website? If the answer is no, start optimizing your site by either making changes to the hosting plan or host. Usually, if your server is full your site will probably load slowly, but as you can see there is a solution.

• Choose the correct keywords

One of the reasons why your bounce rate can be high is because you don’t reach your ideal user. If your website is about small cars, but your visitors prefer trucks, your content will not fit their needs even if it has some similarities.

When including keywords in your text, they must be related to both your service and the content you offer. If, for example, you use a certain title to describe an event, but if it has nothing to do with its content, Google won’t know it. As a result, you will be making a serious mistake.

If a user enters your site in search of a post that later does not contain the desired information, they won’t like it. For this reason, before using keywords you must study them to achieve good organic positioning.

The keywords must be chosen by an SEO specialist, and if you do not have this knowledge the best thing to do is to hire a digital marketer.

• You must optimize your editorial line

Attention to this point! You can have a very well-designed blog, but if your content isn’t high-quality, it will not be attractive to any reader. Your bounce rate will have a high impact according to the optimization of your content.

Because of this, you must take care of your editorial line. However, if you can’t write, try hiring a professional web writer.

Does your website have the following elements?

• A good SEO strategy.
• A fast loading speeds.
• An excellent design.

If all these elements are working as they should, you should also add high-quality content. In it, you should make sure to add surprising and consistent titles.

To make your content magical, try to make your first paragraph interesting enough so that the user will feel interested and continue reading.

• Don’t forget to add a search bar and a chat

Do you want users to spend a long time on your website? The Internet user is very curious, but if they enter a site and don’t find what they’re looking for, they will leave without thinking twice.

That is why, for the user to find what they are looking for, at first sight, you must include a search bar. Similarly, this bar must be visible so that everyone who visits your site can see it. This way, they will find the content that they like the most and spend more time on your site.

And just as a search bar is important, so is an online chat. Users will always have doubts that they will not be able to solve and will need your immediate help to clarify them.

The chat will fit perfectly on the services page, and you will notice how the users will be genuinely pleased with this option.

• Include calls to action

You must showcase the objectives of your website at all times.

Because of this, all elements of the design must be visible on the first page.

Titles, subtitles, landing pages, action forms, among others, must be explicit to capture the attention of users and take action.

All these techniques that we just showed you are elementary if you want to reduce the bounce rate on your website.

Did you like this post?

To have a more concrete understanding of the performance of your website, its bounce rate will be very helpful.

Each of these techniques requires a lot of professionalism at the time of being carried out.

At BluCactus we can help you optimize your website to reduce the bounce rate considerably.

You just have to contact us and we will gladly assist you.

BluCactus, your ally in Digital marketing

BluCactus international marketing agency serves clients all over the world. Our specialty? The creation of web designs and SEO positioning in online searches. Our group of experts focuses on helping businesses and brands succeed in one of the most competitive sectors in the market, the digital world.

BluCactus will accompany you in every step that your brand takes. This goes from the creation of the branding of your business to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with the creation of your website or the administration of your accounts on social media.

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