3 ways to decrease your website’s bounce rate

Written on 03 August, 2015 by Lisa Shannahan
Categories Web Design & Content Tags customer behaviour small business web design

You’ve perfected your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, worked hard on your SEO strategy and created a social media presence, but what good is persuading people to land on your website if they leave it immediately?

If you’re suffering from a high bounce rate, you’re essentially throwing away the hard work it took to entice potential customers to your site. Here are some easy ways to increase stickiness and persuade users to stay.

1. Benchmark your averages

There are two main reasons for a high bounce rate: either your website is too confusing and difficult to use, or your page doesn’t offer what the visitor is looking for. So how do you work out where you’re going wrong? Start by using Google Analytics to get a firm idea of the behaviour of traffic currently visiting your site and which visitors are most likely to leave again in a hurry. Do you find you get plenty of traffic from your paid campaigns but aren’t benefiting from their visits? Or that your leads from social sites quickly fizzle out? Identify the biggest problem areas and look carefully at your traffic sources – does your website meet the expectations those sources set up?

2. Focus your hunt

When trying to attract new visitors to your site, focus your attention on the kind of visitors who are likely to convert. Many businesses take a ‘the more the merrier’ approach to targeting web users. However, if you refine your keyword selection to hone in on the kind of visitors who meet your demographic requirements, you’re saving yourself a lot of time and effort – as well as reducing your bounce rate. Improve the targeting of your online marketing campaigns and always create multiple landing pages for key terms – that way you can ensure new visitors find the content they’re looking for based on their behaviour and searches.

3. Create great content

Creating high-quality content is the easiest way to ensure visitors find exactly what they’re looking for. Webpages should be streamlined, quick to load and offer visitors something of value. What that something is will depend on how they arrived on your site and how far through the buying cycle they are. However, it’s essential that each page always has a clear main message and that all other elements support that message. Whether you’re providing interesting blogs, videos, infographics, product details or information about a special discount, the next step should be perfectly obvious to your visitor, so your call to action needs to be loud and clear.

Check your analytics and consider giving your website a quick overhaul for the chance to get your bounce rate under control.

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