How to Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate
Your website’s bounce rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website — in other words, single-page visitors.
If visitors bounce, it suggests they either didn’t find what they were looking for, or the page wasn’t user-friendly.
Unfortunately, a high bounce rate is significant, since it indicates that your website visitors aren’t looking for more content on your site, clicking on your calls-to-action, or converting into contacts. And to inbound marketers whose primary goal is to attract and convert website visitors into highly qualified leads for their sales teams, a high bounce rate is obviously some pretty scary stuff.
How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate
Set Realistic Expectations: Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates
- Content Websites: 40-60%
- Lead Generation: 30-50%
- Blogs: 70-98%
- Retail Sites: 20-40%
- Service Sites: 10-30%
- Landing Pages: 70-90%
Attract the Right Visitors
- Choose the right keywords to match your content — not just to attract the most number of visitors.
- Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
- Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
- Write attractive, useful meta descriptions for search engine users.
- Improve targeting of online advertising campaigns.
Enhance Usability
- Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bulleted lists, white space, good color contrast, and large headlines.
- Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers .
Speed Up Page Load Time
- Use little or no self-loading multimedia content.
- Set external links to open in new browser windows/tabs.
- Don’t let ads distract from your content: Place static ads to sides, and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.
Provide Quality Content
- Have an obvious main message.
- Use clear headers and subheads.
- Tailor content to intended visitors.
- Use stylish copy and images.
- Make your content error-free.
- Include a clear call-to-action and obvious links to next steps.