What is Bounce Rate and How Can it Help Improve Your Website

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of site visits that are single-page sessions. This means that the visitor leaves without viewing a second page. It is usually used as a measurement of a website’s overall engagement. Mathematically speaking,

Bounce rate of a page = (Visitors who only viewed a particular page/total numbers of entrances to that page)

Bounce rate of the website = (Total number of bounces across the website/total number of entrances across the website)

So, is a high bounce rate always bad? Not necessarily. If your website is a directory where visitors find information on the entrance page, a high bounce rate could actually mean that the site is performing well. Hence, bounce rate needs to be considered in the context of the purpose and type of the site.

How to Reduce Bounce Rate?

While bounce rate doesn’t directly affect your page ranking, it is still something you should understand and improve upon. Below are some of the proven strategies in enhancing a site’s bounce rate.

Provide a Better Overall User Experience – User experience is the visitor’s overall experience while interacting with your website. Good user experience is when a user finds a website not only easy to navigate but also engaging & informative. Creating a website that looks and works equally great on all platforms provides a better user experience, which helps reducing the bounce rate.

Content Strategy – If you want to increase visitors’ engagement level to your site, a reputable digital media company says that the most impactful action to take is to identify the content you think users will like. Once the right content has been identified, you can design your website to display the most engaging content above the fold prominently. Additionally, make sure to include titles, images, and descriptions that drive CTR.

Improve website load speed – Websites that load slower have high bounce rates and lower conversion rates. If your site takes a long time to load, visitors may get tired of waiting and click the back button before they even read a single word.

Optimize Your Call to Action Placement –  Make sure that your call to action is clear and honest. Misleading users will create a bad user experience, one of the top reasons for high landing page bounce rate and low conversions.

Use Videos To Engage Your Audience – It is proven that videos are highly engaging and grab attention more than text or even images. You can use a full screen video as a background, or add it to your call to action. In addition to this, you can also use animations, music, audio, etc.

Improve your content readability – One of the most common reasons your visitors might be bouncing is the lack of readability of your content. As you may know, people nowadays don’t read. They just skim through. This means that if you have large text blocks on your web page, it’s hard for users to read over and see if it’s something they like to read more about. Therefore, your visitors will soon lose focus and attention. For your site, this results in a bounced session. Instead, publish content with readability in mind, allowing users to scan the content and pull out the essential bits in seconds.

By now, you probably know your site’s overall bounce rate. Does it seem high to you? If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that could reduce your bounce rate and improve your search ranking, contact Creativo at +971 4 568 4882.