How To Improve The Bounce Rate Of My Website

When you’re beginning website design, you want to make sure that people are actually staying on your page as opposed to bouncing right out of it.

What used to be in the realm of guesswork is now a fully quantifiable metric in its own right.

Simply put, bounce rate is the percentage of people who navigate to your site and then don’t click on any other part of the page and leave your site.

decrease website bounce rate

If a visitor does bounce from your page, this means that either they didn’t find what they were looking for or that the site itself wasn’t user-friendly for whatever the reason.

Dealing With A High Bounce Rate

What a high bounce rate means is that you’re ultimately not converting visitors into leads and then leads into customers.

As you can imagine, this is a dangerous problem to have for web design companies, and so is something that definitely needs to be worked on if you’re going to succeed.

Luckily, there are ways for you to reduce the percentage in your bounce rate and so put added value into the content that you’re sharing through your site.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at how to decrease the bounce rate of your website and so increase the power that your website has.

reducing the bounce rate
Image: http://www.123rf.com/profile_olivier26

How To Reduce Bounce Rate

The opposite of a bounce rate is a conversion rate. This relates to the percentage of visitors you receive who are converted to whatever you wanted them to do.

This could be to buy something, sign up for a mailing list, or send a message. There is a variety of other things that you can try to convert a visitor.

One way to increase your conversion rate and so decrease your bounce rate is to have more landing pages.

A landing page is a page that a visitor can “land on” in order to funnel them into an actionable goal, such as what we discussed above.

When even your landing pages get a high bounce rate, that’s a sign that your entire brand needs to be reviewed, so hopefully you aren’t at that level.

website user experience
Image: http://www.123rf.com/profile_choreograph

Improve Onsite Readability

So how do you reduce your bounce rate? One way is to improve your content’s readability.

Eliminate walls of text, you shouldn’t be going beyond five or six lines of text per paragraph.

If you have chunky blocks of text, your visitor won’t have an incentive to read on, since the layout of the text isn’t aesthetically pleasing and also conjures up thoughts of unreadable information.

It’s best to break up your information into small paragraphs that are written the way that you speak.

This will lead to a professional yet personable experience that will draw visitors in rather than push them away.

The headline should be bold, and subheadings and bullet points should be used to further elaborate on any information.

You can also use:

  • Charts
  • Graphs
  • Infographs
  • And other information when appropriate.

You can bold keywords as long as you don’t overdo it. What other strategies can you use?

Asking questions will keep your audience captive and able to participate instead of just read.

Another thing that you can do is make a subheading called “Conclusion” that will end with a strong call-to-action and allow the reader of your SEO service or local SEO service to wrap up the information in their head.

avoid popup ads
Image: http://www.123rf.com/profile_rawpixel

Avoid Popups If At All Possible

Popups have been avoided like the plague by the majority of visitors, to the point where visitors might leave your site should they be assaulted with one of these annoying ads.

Another type of popup that’s particularly annoying for visitors are the ones that use strong, covering up the exit button, making you even more annoyed.

Even with all of that said, popups do work. They’re capable of growing your email list quite quickly.

You can use popups, but it will probably decrease your number of organic visitors and make you more of a short-term site.

Some popup ads are well-designed and are able to convert visitors into customers or subscribers at the very least, but this is a kind of hit or miss feature in general.

website wireframe layout
Image: http://www.123rf.com/profile_ronstik

It’s tricky in the world of website design to figure out just what will work best for your visitors. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it should help you to better understand what goes into developing a strong strategy for your small business going into the future.

Improving readability, working on making successful landing pages, and maximizing your ad potential are just a few of the things that you can do to increase your conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate.

It’s best for you to experiment with these guidelines and make a few of your own along the way to figure out what works best for you and your small business.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *