We all want people to visit our website and get to know what you have to offer. Of course we don’t want all of our visitors to immediately leave after just checking out one page. Not only does it hurt our website in the short term and long term, it’s demoralizing as a company to know that people don’t want what you’re offering.
Ok, let’s say that a person spends 30 minutes viewing and reading your page they landed on, does it still count towards your bounce rate? You better believe it! It’s one thing to keep them intrigued in your content, but are you giving them enough incentive to know more? Are you enticing them to check out more of what you have to give?
For one thing, your website needs to have more web pages for them to go and you need more internal links for them to easily find them.
Now, don’t get bounce rate and exit rate confused. These are two different beasts that, although similar, are very different metrics. Exit rate is the percentage of visits who actively click away to a different site from a specific page, whereas bounce rate is the percentage of visits that were the only one of the session.
Can A High Bounce Rate Affect My Rankings
This answer may scare many of you so we won’t drag it out. The thing about dragging things out is…kidding! The answer is yes, a high bounce rate can negatively affect your rankings. One way bounce rates can negative affect impact your rankings is when a user visits your site , clicks back to the search results, and clicks on a competitor’s result.
Basically, the user is saying that your website is not good enough and your competitor is fulfilling the user’s needs better. Google is definitely taking note of it and can eventually adjust rankings accordingly.
Here are a few key factors to keep watch that can affect your bounce rate:
- Bad/irrelevant content
- Broken internal links
- Irrelevant keyword matching
- Slow speed
- Bad mobile optimization
By improving these factors on your site, you’re giving your website the best chances it has to provide user with a better experience.
What Can You Do?
User Experience
First, look at your website through the eyes of a user. View it as if you’ve never seen or heard of your website, product, or service. Are you able to immediately know what your website is about, what it offers, why would I want to find out more?
You can also use Heatmaps; it’s software that shows you specific user behaviors that people look at, scroll to, and click through. The valuable information that Heatmaps provides can tell us where people are prone to click and where we want to place our best content so that it can be viewed the most.
Using this tactic allows us to test your site with call-to-actions, menu bars, adding links to images, etc.
Relevancy
As we mentioned earlier this blog post, relevancy is key to lowering your bounce rates. It’s simple: the content should match your keyword and URL. Our blog title is indicating that we’re going to touch on the topic of bounce rates, yet we decide to create content that is all about apple pies. Although the content is delicious to the tongue, its not appetizing for people wanting to read about bounce rates.
Don’t promise something that the visitors don’t get.
Make sure your title tags and meta descriptions paint an honest picture of what your pages are about.
Internal Linking
Internal links do not only have SEO benefits, it’s great for the user to use to visit more pages on your site. The goal of your internal linking should be to invite people to look further on your site. Plugins like a “Related Articles” at the end of your blog content can be utilized.
Mobile Optimization
Many of us who have our own websites tend to forget that our websites are on mobile too and they should be optimized just as much as desktop. Mobile users still count towards your bounce rate if they are leaving your website immediately.
Mobile accounts for 50.3% of all web traffic worldwide. By forgetting to optimize for mobile, you’re forgetting half of all users. We highly suggest you constantly check your site on your mobile device to see if your website is mobile-friendly.
Website Speed
The fact of the matter is, if your website is slow, people will bounce. Check your page speed at GT Metrixor Lighthouse to know how fast or slow your website takes to load.
Now, fixing the page speed of your website is a technical aspect that many of us cannot fix on our on and will need professional help. If your page speed is slow and have no idea how to fix it, we highly advise hiring a professional rather than fixing it yourself. You may do more harm than good.
Call-To-Action
We’ve finally arrived to the call-to-action, the usually forgotten but just as important. Including a call-to-action to your website directs the users on what to do next. Every page on your site should have a specific goal in mind and we need to lead our users to reach our end goal.
Make sure all your pages and posts have at least one call-to-action, even if you find it hard to find one that is relevant. For example, by the end of this blog post, I will ask you to subscribe to our blogs to keep up-to-date with the latest in Digital Marketing and to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Final Thoughts
Every day that you’re ignoring your bounce rate is another day that you’re losing traffic to your website. We’ve given you the simple truth on what affects your bounce rates and how to get started to fix it. If you’ve made it this far, we want to include another call-to-action, hereby asking you if you ever have any questions regarding SEO, PPC, Web Design, or Email Marketing, be sure to contact us! Also, if you’d like to contact us to see how we can help improve your website, fill out our contact form and we’ll get back to you immediately. There you have it; we included a call-to-action and a couple of internal links for you to check out the rest of our site – click away and tell us about your experience!
