What makes for a positive Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is simple, companies may see a range of 75-85% bounce rate to be great, where the next company will see this to be possibly catastrophic. It’s all dependent on the site and the goals of the business.
Sites should keep an eye on the bounce rate as an indication of how appealing their website is, and the possible steps they may need to reduce the number as much as possible. Bounce rate can also have an influence on your search rankings, visible through Google Analytics. So it’s clear you need to maintain constant optimization for the metrics.
Optimize your page load times
It’s easy enough to see that if your bounce rate is high, you’d assume the issue was with the quality or quantity of content. But this is not entirely true as problems can occur even before the viewer has had the chance to view much of your content at all.
Often taking forever to load is strongly one of the worst problems a web page can experience. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter on the quality of content if the viewer is having a bad experience. Viewers will often expect a web page to load in two seconds or even less, otherwise it makes them tiresome, proving that the on site optimization is an important factor for reducing your bounce rate.
If you want some tips on how to optimize and improve user experience, then see our guide here.
Internal links in your content
Including internal links in your content, it is a great way to reduce bounce rate. This strategy works really well, your analytics will show this and that it is essential to accurately measure the users time spent on a page. However, it’s also possible that it can backslash, making your content appear cheap and quick.
We’ve all seen sites that link internally in every other sentence, and not only does this look awful, it doesn’t do much to enrich the user experience or offer audiences something of genuine value.
If you have great blog content posts that are on dedicated topics, then it would be of importance for your audience to have links around and about your site. But take into account to not go overboard with excessive internal linking. This causes confusion and overwhelms your user base, deterring them from accessing the links. You can also see our ‘internal link’ for a guide on ‘internal links’ here.
Make your site more ‘mobile friendly’
The importance of mobile friendliness is so crucial in today’s society, but so many websites still haven’t got there yet. Every year, the overall number of people accessing sites on mobile devices is increasing. If you fail to optimize your site for mobiles, then this could be a good indication for why your site’s bounce rate increases.
The reason so many skip the mobile optimisation is because it’s time and resource consuming, especially for a larger website that includes multiple internal pages and complex mapping or different page structures. It’s a long process, and may be out of your hands, which can be an expense when outsourcing to contractors.
However, the importance is very real, there are just too many people using mobile devices, and it’s silly not to optimize your site. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, if it’s going to boost your site and provide more flow and influx of customers or viewers. See 5 ways to improve mobile friendliness here.
Provide smoothe site navigation
If you envision yourself in your viewers position, you will want an easy way to find your destination. This means that even the slightest snags to get there, they may just consider another accessible site. This is why you need to make it effortless for your viewers.
To achieve this, it must be clear, easily understood, and offeran easy flow through your site to return and move forward to different destinations. Don’t make your viewers guess or have to work to find what they want, make it simple by providing easy, understandable pathways that you’ve put into place. It’s as simple as that. Learn how to dissect good navigation here.
Bounce Rate Conclusion
So after some simple diagnostics, understanding optimization, internal linking, mobile friendliness and navigation help identify simple fixes to customers heading in the opposite direction. It’s down to you to challenge yourself and your site, to simplify and provide a good experience to your user base. After all, the only thing your viewers are here for, is the content and what you’re providing that benefits them. Good luck and take what you have learnt into account.