What is a bounce rate?
Simply put, your bounce rate reflects the amount of visitors who landed on your website, but either left immediately or did not continue beyond the first page. Ideally, you want to encourage visitors to take the journey through your website to increase the chance of conversions. To minimize your bounce rate, you’ll need to make a great first impression, followed up by presenting engaging content that keeps users around until it’s time to convert.
You can track your bounce rate using tools like Google Analytics.
How can you improve your bounce rate?
Learn why your visitors are leaving your site so quickly
To understand why your visitors are leaving your site, you first need to know why and how they landed there in the first place. Think about who your ideal prospect is, and what their needs are. Are you effectively communicating your ability to solve their problems on the homepage of your website? Get their attention with bold content that lets them know what you offer, and demonstrate your value immediately.
Communicate with visuals
Website users are impatient. On average, someone who lands on your website will look at it for 8 seconds before they either decide to stay, or find what they’re looking for somewhere else. That’s about as much time as it took you to read from the beginning of this section to the end of this sentence…not a lot of time (or words) to convince someone that you can provide them with what they need. Instead of trying to direct users with dense content sections, grab their attention immediately with images and short headlines that are relevant to their needs. Give them the option to dig deeper and read more after they’ve decided to stick around.
Create a better user experience from the beginning
This fix speaks to the above points, but extends beyond your visitors’ initial impressions. Once you know what your users are looking for and have convinced them to continue moving through your site, it’s important that your website is intuitive and engaging. Even if a visitor is immediately presented with the idea that you have what they need, they still might leave if your website is frustrating to use, boring, or if your solution is hard to find. Are you making them read too much text? Are your buttons too small and hard to click? We recommend putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes and using your own website as they would. Pay close attention to any areas that would frustrate you as a visitor, and rework them.
Engineer your website’s sales path for to keep visitors moving
Maybe your visitors are excited about what you have to offer when they first land on your site, but they just don’t know where to go next. Have you thought about how you’re directing your prospects through your site, or are you giving them free reign to just click around and hope they eventually land where you want them to? Are you keeping them on the homepage with nowhere to go after? Lead your visitors though your site with clearly defined calls-to-action that encourage them to stick around, and eventually convert to leads.
Want help improving your website’s bounce rate? Contact us, and we’ll provide a free evaluation!
