Lower Your Website’s Bounce Rate For Better Results

What does “Bounce Rate” mean? One of the key indicators of how well your small business website is doing can be found in your Google Analytic’s “Bounce Rate”. Essentially, the bounce rate measures how many people went to a page on your website and just left; they didn’t do anything else.

Think of it this way: If your site has a Bounce Rate of 50%, half of everyone going to your website goes only to a single page.

Reducing Your Bounce Rate Is An Easy Way To Get A Lot More Customers

Let’s say your website is getting 300 unique visitors a month. With a Bounce Rate of 50%, that means 150 people are not engaging with your site; they’re just leaving. If you could bring your Bounce Rate down to 40% that’s an extra 30 people who are engaging with you through your site every month…an extra 360 people a year!

Often, you can significantly lower your Bounce with some simple site tweaks and a few hours. It’s an easy way to engage with a whole lot more people!

What Should My Bounce Rate Be?

I should point out that the Bounce Rate is a bit of a “fuzzy” number for reasons outside the scope of this article. However, it’s a very good general indicator of how engaging your website is.  Here’s how we see Bounce Rates for the typical local small business:

7 Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

While wrestling down your Bounce Rate can be an involved process, there are 7 things to look at first:

1. Your Brand. What is the immediate feeling people getting when they see the design of your website? In those critical first few seconds is your site’s design resonating with your target market? If your website looks amateur, ugly or haphazard, your visitors will leave as quickly as they came.
2. Clear Navigation. Is it easy for people to find what they’re looking for? Make sure your website is using popular menu conventions.
3. Speak Customer. Is the message of your website written in technical speak or in a language your customers will understand? We see this mistake a lot! It’s critical that your website “meet your customer where they’re at”, using language that they readily understand. If you know your customers are looking for “a reliable plumber” then your site should very clearly say “Reliable Plumber”.
4. Calls to Action. What action do you want your website visitors to take when they visit?? Your entire site should be designed and organized around these actions: opt-in offers, internal links to other pages on your site, etc .
5. Better Content. Does your site talk about things your target market cares about? Make sure the pages of your website are directly addressing the needs and wants of your target market. If you’re running a blog (and you probably should be!) make sure you’re offering good, original content and not trying to be too “cute” with your headlines.
6. Better SEO. Is your site getting targeted visitors? If a lot of your traffic is “junk” traffic, of course those people won’t find any value in your site and just leave. By doing a bit more analysis we can help you to determine the quality of your traffic. Adjusting your SEO to attract more of the right kinds of visitors can automatically reduce your Bounce Rate.
7. Is it Mobile Usable? Is your website offering a pleasing experience to people on their smart phones? In another article on mobile responsive web design, I showed how there’s been a huge increase in the number of people coming to websites on smart phones. If you look at the Bounce Rate of your site for mobile vs. desktop visitors, you may see a much higher Bounce Rate for your mobile visitors.

There are many, many more things that can be looked at but the above list should provide an excellent starting point.

Where To Find Your Bounce Rate

Hopefully, your site is running Google Analytics and you’re checking in with it often.

1. Log into your Google Analytics Account.
2. On the main dashboard page, you will see a series of statistics, “bounce rate” will be one of those.

The Bounce Rate found in your Google Analytic’s dashboard is your bounce rate for your whole site. You can also look at your Bounce Rate for each page of your site. To see those, you’ll need to do some clicking to drill down into it:

1. On the left hand menu, under “Content”, click on “Overview”.
2. Near the bottom right of the Content Overview page, under the listing of your top 10 pages, you should see a link called “view full report”. Click on that.

You should now see your Bounce Rate, broken down by page.

Remember: lower your Bounce Rate, increase your Ka-Ching! If you need help interpreting your Google Analytic’s numbers, let us know and we’ll help you out.