Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions during which visitors left your site from the landing page without interacting with it. Interestingly, it doesn’t take into account scrolling. Scrolling is in fact one of the most common ways visitors interact with your pages. But overall, it is something that is inversely proportional to conversion rate and your sales. So what can you do to reduce your site’s bounce rate and improve your profit margins?
Here are 10 steps you can take to minimize the bounce rate on your web pages:
1. Don’t Use Popups
Studies show that over 70% of web users find popups to be nothing more than irrelevant. Popups act as nothing more than annoyance to your visitors. When people visit your site and see popups that disrupt the UX, they are more likely to leave. Research shows that no more than 14% of customers are likely to respond to your popup ads and over 50% of people give positive response to offers promoted through emails.
If you want to improve your site’s UX and reduce the bounce rate, it is recommended to best avoid the use of popups. However, if you must use them, it will be better to make them unobtrusive or rather use pop-unders.
2. Load Your Site Faster
People neither have the time nor the patience to wait for a site that loads slowly. A slow site will eliminate all types of engagement and increase bounce rate. Start by making your pages as light as possible, especially for mobile users. We know the importance of speed for you, so we integrate each of our packages with SSD service and adopt the best Dell servers in our data center, ensuring you fast hosting speed.
3. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
Google recently released the “mobilegeddon” upgrade. It now makes it extremely important for websites to be mobile friendly. Besides, over 50% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Interestingly, only a tiny percentage of websites are currently compatible with smartphones and tablets.
Therefore, if your webpages are not compatible with mobile devices, you are most likely to lose almost 50% of your visitors. Also referred to as responsive design, mobile friendliness is a crucial factor in reducing your bounce rate.
4. Avoid Low-traffic Targeting Keywords
Stop using keywords and marketing channels which are irrelevant to your product offerings. This was being used years ago to just improve the traffic. However, if used today, this strategy is not only going to increase your bounce rate, it will also affect your search rankings. Besides, it is also highly likely that Google can penalize your account.
Study your analytic reports to identify the keywords and sources which are sending irrelevant and poor quality traffic. Create a list of these marketing channels and stop them from doing further damage to your online reputation.
5. Create User Friendly Landing Pages
Create landing pages that provide the required information to your visitors. Even if you are generating tons of traffic, but if your landing pages don’t provide the required information to your visitors, you can expect high percentage of bounce rates. Therefore, you need to create well-designed landing pages with the information that your visitors want to know.
6. Create Easily Comprehensible Content
Create simple and easy to understand content. In other terms, the content on your landing pages should be easy to “consume” for your targeted audience. If you can create such content, it will help improve your bounce rate.
High quality content goes a long way in promoting your brand and message. Even if people leave your site during their initial visits, they are highly likely to bookmark your high quality page (content) and return later. If you have no idea on how to create quality content, follow the writing tips for better web content. Besides, remember to prevent plagiarism in blog writing,
because copy and past on Internet may make you involved with unintentional trouble.
7. Always make Data-based Decisions
In addition, creating a good and intuitive web design is also important to optimize your web elements based on data. It can be a time consuming process of collecting data and making regular modifications, but it will pay off in the form of reduced bounce rates.
8. Take Care of Backlinks
Make sure that all your backlinks are relevant and originate from relevant sources. It will be best if you earn your backlinks. Google has increasingly taken an aggressive stance in terms of the quality of backlinks. Research your external links and if they are irrelevant and of poor quality, you must have them removed. This will also help reduce the bounce rate by preventing poor quality traffic from reaching your pages.
9. Improvement Effective Social Media Strategy
Social signals are more important than ever. Care should be taken how you optimize your content on social sites. If not, it is going to affect your bounce rates. For example, you must use relevant and quality hashtags on Twitter for qualifying your content. You should also improve quality of your metadata such as location.
Similarly, use high quality and relevant images, and other strategies like friend tagging to improve the Facebook experience. Use optimal strategies on these social sites to improve user experience, and this can help in
reducing your bounce rates.
10. Compelling Call to Action
The position and kind of call to action element can play a key role in reducing your bounce rate. Don’t give your potential buyers any reason to leave just because they couldn’t find the CTA button. The call to action should be compelling and easy to find. The text and color of the CTA button should give every reason to your potential customers to click on it.
