Determining what needs to be corrected after identifying a high bounce rate is a valuable approach to increasing user engagement and improving site rankings.
Many people may not know what bounce rate means or why their bounce rate is important. Let’s look at how one can measure and improve the bounce rate.
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What is the Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on a single page on your site and then leave without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that visit.
When a visitor leaves a page without navigating to another page, this is known as a bounce. Bouncing from a website tells you that the visitor has not engaged with that or any other pages on the site.
While the term itself is easy to grasp, the causes for bounces are often more complex than perceived.
What Factors Contribute to High Bounce Rates?
A high bounce rate may be a sign of a poor user experience. If a visitor hits your website and doesn’t get the information they’re looking for, or if they’re underwhelmed by something else, they might decide to leave your site quickly.
However, a high bounce rate can also result in a positive user experience. For example, if you were searching for the ingredients list of a recipe you wanted to make, and you found it immediately on a site you clicked through to, you would leave the site to collect the ingredients.
The high bounce rate is a sign that the website is effective; visitors found the information they needed and didn’t hesitate to go elsewhere, giving them a great user experience.
Hopefully, some of the site’s visitors who got the information quickly from the site they visited will return to the page later by bookmarking it. Others may remember the URL and search for it by name on Google later.
Why High Bounce Rate?
Google’s algorithm is efficient at providing accurate answers to search queries. However, there may be some rare cases where Google may return a website that does not have the correct answer.
A poor choice of keywords or a rare search phrase can cause visitors to see the wrong site in their results. The user could not get hold of the information they wanted. It is not necessarily a bad reflection on your content, as there’s nothing wrong with it. Rather, it usually means that Google’s algorithm didn’t properly match the users’ search words or that the user entered an inaccurate search phrase.
A high bounce rate does not always indicate a problem with the page; however, it is still important to monitor bounce rates to ensure no issues might be driving away visitors.
Techniques to Reduce Bounce Rate
Website Page Load Time
When users must wait more than three seconds for a page to load, their experience using the site will be considerably less positive.
Let it be any content on that page the user is looking for; if it does not load fast, what is its use of it. When dealing with mobile devices, it’s especially important to keep your pages loading quickly. Users are more likely to abandon slow sites and apps.
Focus on Good Website Design
Good website design enables intuitive navigation, instills trust in users, and signals quality.
When visiting a website, people tend not to spend much time on sites that are unattractive or difficult to use. Designing a website that’s visually appealing and functional, and easy to use is not just about aesthetics. It’s about creating a positive overall experience for your users.
Responsive Design for Mobile
Mobile users have a smaller screen, so they have less patience than desktop users.
Most mobile users are on the go, and their attention is divided between the device in their hands and what’s happening around them; they are less likely to remain engaged than desktop users. Sites should be responsive to provide a good user experience to mobile users.
Easy to Read Webpage Content
You should organize a website’s information so that it can be easily read and used.
From a user experience perspective, Clarity and organization are important to website visitors: no one wants to see disorganized text. When this happens, site visitors will usually skip over crucial content.
When content is formatted into smaller blocks, including bullet points or image or video content, your users will have a much easier time understanding and sharing that content.
Create Content with Short Paragraphs
When creating a website, it’s critical to consider the length of the content and adjust it to the type of site being created.
Create short paragraphs to make your content more portable and make it easier for your readers to access on their mobile devices.
Multiple Types of content
One way to improve the readability of your website is to include content in multiple forms, such as written text, photographs, videos, etc.
Video content is often more efficient than text at communicating certain kinds of information, like how-to instructions.
High-quality images can also make communication easier and help users understand big ideas quickly. It, in turn, reduces your bounce rate and improves your SEO.
Use Relevant Keywords
Use relevant keywords, phrases, and synonyms when creating content.
Appropriate words, sentences, paragraphs, and headings help Google index your page for relevant searches.
A webpage needs to contain information about a single topic. A web page that provides only general information about a subject does not satisfy the expectations of visitors who search the internet for specific answers to their questions.
Stay on topic with your content. Visitors who enter your site with a specific question will appreciate that you address the question head-on.
Avoid Broader Audience
You should use content relevant to your audience throughout your website and target the right users.
Identify your core target audience and create content aimed at that group. If your target audience is too broad, you will attract users who are not interested in your site’s offerings.
Focusing on a specific group of users helps to ensure that your site will appeal to people who want to find what it offers. They will spend more time on the site, becoming more engaged.
Make Site Navigation Easy
Navigation should be effortless for visitors to your website. They should be able to navigate easily to the web pages and find what they want.
If your site’s navigation is not simple and user-friendly, visitors will likely leave.
No Popups
Users generally dislike intrusive popups that prevent them from accessing the content they want.
There are more effective ways to show customers than directly placing them in your article content when it comes to Popups. A simple principle is to put the content first when designing a web page. It means letting users read the most important information without interference from navigation ads. So try to avoid popup ads for users to read your website without disturbance.
Avoid Distracting Ads
Like interstitials and popups, ads that are overly distracting should be avoided. If you want your ads to perform well, place them in a horizontal rectangular ad unit at the top of the page, within the content, and along the sides.
Large advertisements make it difficult to find the content you want to read. Avoid placing ads that distort a visitor’s view of the page. When visitors complain about particular ads, listen to them and follow up with them to understand why they’re having trouble with those ads.
Add Good Call-To-Action to a Website
A strong call to action should be visible to all visitors to a website. Users should be able to locate the CTA within seconds of landing on a page. A compelling call to action will prompt users to click on it.
The color scheme, font type, and wording used on a website can influence whether viewers decide to click or not.
Must Limit Broken Links
Broken links create a negative experience for website visitors by preventing them from locating desired content.
There are several ways to search a website for broken links, including using Google Search Console or using a website auditing tool like Screaming Frog.
You can also try creating high-quality backlinks to obtain the benefits.
Internal Linking
When designing a website, include links to other pages so visitors can explore the site; you’ll retain more visitors.
By Internal Linking, users can easily find information on a website, thereby improving their experience.
Links Opening on New Tab
To create a good internal linking structure, make sure that when creating links to other pages on your site, you follow best practices and link to those pages in a way that opens them in a new tab.
It will allow users to browse multiple pages at once. It can potentially increase the time they spend on the site.
Create a 404 Page
A 404 page should explain why the page was not found and lead them to other pages on the site.
It will help users find what they are looking for and keep the bounce rate down.
Consistently Publish Fresh Content
A blog that offers readers a steady stream of new content on various topics can help convince people to visit and stay on the site—and return often.
By offering fresh content on a wide range of topics, a site can attract and hold users’ interest and increase bounce rate.
Display of the Site
Web visitors are concerned with a site’s readability and the reliability of its content. Readers will examine the content and assess how reliable it seems to be.
To build trust with visitors and increase your site’s credibility, you should include positive reviews of whatever products and services your site promotes.
It would help if you showed authentication and security symbols to users to make them feel confident about visiting a site and decrease the likelihood of leaving.
Finally, Track User Engagement
There are several tools available to help you track and monitor user engagement.
We have Google Analytics that can track:
- Time spent on site.
- Website Bounce rate.
- Pages per session.
- Most frequently and least frequently visited pages.
- And much more.
Microsoft’s free Clarity tool provides heat mapping and visitor recording to see what users did during a session. You can view how users react on a certain page and then adjust the page accordingly.
Conclusion
Use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity to diagnose the reasons for high bounce rates. Then improve the site visitor’s experience by building tactics that sustain engagement.
The result will be a website that entices visitors to stay on and search further, which is exactly what Google looks for when ranking pages.
Contact Ahbiv Digital Agency for more accurate information on the topic.
