Easy Ways to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
When you accept that your site has a high bounce rate, you're accepting that your child may not be the most attractive kid in the schoolyard. While you think your precious little angel is adorable, your bounce rate tells a different story when you check it out in Google Analytics.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
A "good" bounce rate is in the eye of the beholder, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. An 80% bounce rate might seem remarkable to some sites but catastrophic to others. Your site and business goals determine what you should do.
Regardless, webmasters and site managers pay close attention to bounce rates to indicate the site's "stickiness" and want to lower this troublesome number. RankBrain, Google's machine-learning algorithm, even affects search rankings based on bounce rate, according to some people.
Optimize Page Load Time
When bounce rates are high, many marketers assume that the problem lies with content - when serious problems arise before a visitor can read a page. One of the worst problems a web page can have is taking forever to load.
A page's content is meaningless if a user can't read it, and 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, so on-page optimization is crucial to reducing bounce rates.
Smart Formatting Improves Accessibility
You can reduce your bounce rate by making your pages as welcoming and accessible as possible. The easier visitors find what they want, the more likely they will stay. Ensure you don't overwhelm your visitors with weighty paragraphs that stretch across entire pages. Use white space to make your content more approachable.
You can make content less visually intimidating with appropriate headers, frequent subheadings, suitable images and bulleted lists.
These formatting options allow the reader to easily scan or skim your content to quickly identify the most relevant points.
Use Sidebar Widgets and Promotions Sparingly
You can offer relevant content, offers, and other material to your audience on some web pages. A blog page is a prime example, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a decent blog without a sidebar. Your visitor will bounce if you overload their digital margins with ads, offers, award emblems, and other crap.
Make sure you highlight relevant content from your sidebar in a way that offers additional reader value. For example, related articles that expand on the topic covered in a blog post are a great way to enhance your site's "stickiness" while giving your readers valuable and useful content.
Similarly, make sure you include only reputable and renowned awards and trust signals in your sidebar to ensure they serve a purpose.
Cross-Reference Bounce Rate with Time on Site
You should consider your bounce rate in the context of your entire site. It allows you to determine whether the problem is with a specific page, page type, or the entire site. Your content may be problematic if your Time on Site metrics are decent, but your blog pages have a high bounce rate. Similarly, if your bounce rate is high and your time on site is low, you may not be providing visitors with what they need.
Ruthlessly Optimize for Relevance
Bounce rates can be influenced primarily by technical factors, like page load times or formatting best practices, as well as a website's relevance - or irrelevance. Despite targeting certain keywords effectively, some sites serve content that is only tangentially relevant to the query or completely irrelevant at worst.
You can almost guarantee that users will bounce if the page you're serving is not directly relevant to their query. Therefore, relevance should be your top priority.