Your website is usually the first interaction consumers have with your business, and it should be designed to keep casual browsers engaged and encourage them to contact you. Ideally, a consumer should land on your site, read about your products or services, and fill out a contact form or navigate to other pages to learn more.
Unfortunately, a visitor’s engagement with your site is not always this smooth. Some visitors land on your site and “bounce” away without engaging with your company. At KME.digital, we are skilled at helping our clients keep their visitors engaged and becoming loyal customers. We implement a variety of strategies to help clients earn more conversions, and keep their bounce rate at a minimum.
Here is our guide to understanding and reducing your bounce rate:
What is a Bounce?
A bounce occurs when a user visits only one page on a website and does not navigate to any additional pages. They may arrive at your homepage or one of your landing pages, but if they do not click any links that take them to an additional page before leaving the website, they will count as a bounce.
The goal of your website, of course, is to encourage potential customers to explore and engage with your company. A high bounce rate is not ideal, since you want to keep visitors engaged with your brand and encourage them to learn as much as they can about your products and services. We consider a bounce rate of 25% – 60% to be a healthy range, but this will vary depending on website type, industry, and target audience. As a general rule of thumb however, the lower the bounce rate, the better.
A Bounce Isn’t Always Bad
Although you ideally want to keep your bounce rate on the lower end, it is important to remember that a bounce is not always a bad thing. Sure, a bounce can hold the negative connotation that a customer decided they weren’t interested in your company and left after looking at just one page.
However, this is not always the case. Perhaps a customer landed on one of your service pages, read the content, and called your office to sign up or learn more. Or, they are not ready to reach out yet, but plan to come back to your site later and finish their purchase or fill out a contact form.
Strategies for Reducing Bounce Rate
Even though bounces aren’t always bad, it is important to monitor your bounce rate and prevent it from getting too high. Here are a few of our tips for reducing your website’s bounce rate:
1. Publish Relevant, Clear Content:
Having relevant, well-written content on your site is best for a few reasons, and lowering that bounce rate is certainly one of the important ones. If a potential customer doesn’t see content that matches what they are expecting or wanting, they will leave without browsing additional pages on your site, or possibly without even reading the entire page they landed on. Ensure the text is written with clear, engaging language. A visitor who cannot understand your content will most likely not visit any additional pages. The appearance of your text matters, too. Avoid using large paragraphs and organize the content using headings, subheadings, and even bullet points so the text will look cleaner and be easier to read.
2. Add Links and Strong Calls to Action
Your pages should encourage all visitors to contact you, or at least visit other pages on your site to learn more about your products and services. This can be better accomplished by adding links and calls to action to your service pages. Wherever relevant, add a link or two to other pages on your site that relates to the current page’s content. For example, if you are a home remodeling company and your main kitchen renovation services page lists cabinet installation as one of your services, add a link to your cabinet installation page. This will encourage potential clients who are interested in getting new cabinets to click and learn more about the types of cabinets you offer after reading the main kitchen renovation page.
Every service page must have at least one call to action to encourage visitors to contact you. For businesses, this will likely include linking them to a contact form, appointment booking page, or online store. Calls to action must be clear, strong, and direct. This is your opportunity to encourage the reader to learn more about your company—and to avoid a bounce.
3. Improve Your Site Loading Speed
We all know the frustration of waiting for a web page to load. How often have you decided it wasn’t worth the wait, and closed the site to look for a different source to get the information you need? Consumers will act the same way. Typically, if your site does not load in less than 3 seconds, a visitor will leave, resulting in a bounce. Check with your server provider to learn the best strategies for giving your site loading speed a boost.
4. Have a Mobile-Friendly Site
An overwhelming percentage of consumers will search for your services and arrive on your site from a mobile device. Your website must be responsive and mobile-friendly so it can adapt to display well on any device. Non-responsive web pages may appear cut off or disorganized on mobile devices, making your content difficult to read and your site challenging to navigate. A user may get frustrated with the quality of your site on mobile and leave without navigating to other pages, which increases your bounce rate.
5. Remove Auto-Playing Video and Audio:
Sites that auto-play a video or audio upon arrival to the homepage or a landing page are jarring and are likely to result in a bounce. Visitors arriving at your site may just want to casually browse through your services and learn more about your company and may be caught off guard by an auto-playing video or audio file. An auto-playing video or audio file may seem annoying, or even betray the discretion the visitor wants to keep while browsing. If thrown off guard by an auto-play message, the visitor will most likely immediately leave the site, resulting in a bounce.
For example, one of our past clients, a divorce attorney, used to have a video pop-up that auto-played a welcome message immediately after someone landed on the site. Individuals visiting a divorce attorney’s website most likely want to do so privately and discretely, so this is probably not the best time to automatically blare an audio message through the speakers, especially for visitors who do not want their coworkers (or spouse) to hear. Once we removed the auto-play video from their site, their bounce rate decreased from 88% to 58%.
Lower Your Bounce Rate With KME.digital!
From content generation to mobile site development and everything in between, we offer a variety of services and strategies that will help our clients keep their bounce rate low and their conversions high. Our digital marketing services have helped hundreds of local businesses turn curious browsers into loyal customers.
Is your site struggling with a high bounce rate? Unsure of how to measure your bounce rate? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help!