It is important to know how your website appeals to its users and how relevant it is to your target audience. Here are important tips to help you reduce your website’s bounce rate and have potential customers get the best out of your site.
An online presence and the will to execute a campaign that leads people to said presence are just some of the prerequisites of generating a healthy ROI. But, while it’s a good start, it’s not the be-all and end-all of what you need to do in order to succeed online.
In fact, you could have the most eye-catching site and an aggressive digital marketing strategy to bring your target audience to the yard yet still come up empty-handed conversion-wise.
What are you doing wrong? And, more importantly, how do you fix it?
What makes a website appealing to others?
The downfall of many company websites and, ultimately, the campaign they’re attached to, lies in the fact that users are entering and then exiting a single page on your domain without so much as interacting with a single element and giving you the opportunity to convert them.
Calls-to-action are ignored, content links are skimmed over, and lead magnets are left un-downloaded: This is what we call a bounce.
And the higher the bounce rate, the worse off your campaign is. It’s a serious symptom that tells you it might be time for a major digital strategy redesign.
As a general rule, low website bounce rates are good. So, if you want to capture more high-quality leads, you’ll need to do a deep dive into the site elements that could influence whether or not your visitor makes a meaningful interaction with your online presence.
The following are some critical aspects that you should look into when bounce rates are problematic.
Responsiveness
Your website should be accessible on every possible device. So, you or your outsourced website specialist need to make sure your domain is versatile enough to be able to effectively deliver information and value on desktop and mobile platforms and everything else in between.
This will involve, to name the most important parts, ensuring that your typography is readable no matter where it’s viewed, that the screen adjusts to alternating devices, and that there are no issues with the way the website media is displayed.
Page load speed
A domain with all the bells and whistles sure does impress visitors. You’ll have to take into account, however, that website pages with too many elements can bog download speeds — and one thing you don’t want to do is bore your visitor with a prolonged wait time. It will most certainly guarantee a bounce.
When creating your website, keep your end-users’ capacity to quickly load a site at the forefront of your mind. They might not be able to handle such a heavy data load, so opt for simple and clean designs. You can also use file compressing resources like tinypng.com to reduce your image’s file sizes.
Navigability and CTAs
Visitors don’t only want fast-loading website pages. They are also looking for a user experience that’s smooth and intuitive. When designing interactions with your website, always aim for architectural logic that is prominent as well as easily accessed and used.
Another aspect of a website that appeals to visitors is the way calls-to-action are formulated and placed. Visitors prefer not to encounter any ambiguities in what their next step would be; that way only leads to more bounces. CTAs should be utilized cleverly and situated in key positions to lead users further into the funnel.
Content value
Websites that can offer visitors valuable and relevant information do best where bounce rates are concerned. This is, of course, because when the user senses that the site was created to serve their specific needs with posts that are fresh or feature evergreen content, they stay and engage with the site.
Together with a solid marketing strategy and some clean website design and development, any business owner could significantly increase the influx of high-quality leads.
To add to the above points: pop-ups, while carrying some great potential for remarketing, play a part in whether your bounce rates go up or down. Specifically, content should be only disrupted by pop-ups at important parts of the journey. Overwhelming visitors with pop-ups at every turn will only hurt your chances for conversion.
Reducing your bounce rate
Naturally, if you want to lower your bounce rates, then you’ll have to address any issues you detected from the features we mentioned above. We’ve compiled some simple but highly effective fixes you can implement to keep your visitors’ attention and entice them into interacting with elements on your website:
- Prioritize formatting – One of a website’s critical functions is to communicate and deliver your brand’s message to users. You can’t do that when your text content is unreadable. Make long text and paragraphs easier on the eye by using spaces, headers, and bullet points to make your text content more digestible.
- Make your audience relate through storytelling – The obvious pair to the first item, getting your audience to take a bite of your brand’s message is critical to improving your website’s bounce rates. After all, spending time making your text readable will lead to nothing if your text is devoid of personality or storytelling flair.
Capture your audience’s attention by weaving your narrative around their experiences and pain points and how you could help them. Stay truthful about your capabilities, though, no matter how easy it might seem to embellish your claims. Your content shouldn’t come at the expense of your brand’s credibility.
- Generate fresh content regularly to gain traction – When we talk about fresh content, again, we aren’t simply advising that you put out anything for the sake of it. The kind of fresh content that’s needed should be designed and strategically deployed to reel the reader in because it makes sense and offers value: it delivers actionable content that can resolve the readers’ concerns.
- Optimize with the right keywords – Fresh, high-value content makes you a darling with your users. Optimizing said content with the right keywords means that you improve your search engine visibility. When deciding on which keywords to use, you usually have to take four aspects of value into account: Persona value, Traffic value, Brand value, and Conversion value.
A keyword that intersects with all four aspects is your basis for what makes a keyword worth your time, but if you’re unsure as to which keywords fit into this category, then it would be wise to hire an SEO services provider to take care of things.
- Match high-value keywords with corresponding landing pages – Another culprit behind your website’s high bounce rate is that users come to your home page and don’t immediately find what they need. You can remedy this by creating landing pages that target the high-value keywords that you’ve observed users input in your niche. Doing so not only reduces bounce rates but brings up conversions.
- Set up a seamless and streamlined website design – Your user’s ability to find their way around your website is important, and, in a way, it goes along with the argument about optimizing landing pages with keywords you know your users are searching. If they are able to intuit the structure of your domain, navigating to the destination page which has the answer to their needs will be easy. Bounce rates go down while conversion potential goes up.
- Check for mobile responsiveness – These days, not everyone will be accessing your website on a desktop. Mobile devices are infinitely more convenient, and it’s likely that users will be inputting their search query while on the go. Make sure that your website contents load properly and quickly on these devices to give visitors a positive website experience and keep bounce rates down.
- No unnecessary distractions – While it’s true that disruptive tactics could play a critical role in conversions (they’re perfect for remarketing and they can grow your lists like no one’s business and help create leads), it doesn’t justify peppering your website with clutter. Limit your pop-up use to the barest you can get it and focus more on enriching customer UX.
- Make your external links open in a new tab – Maintain the mindset that your website exists to help a user by delivering your product or service or piece of information. Therefore, if you used external links to support your content, make sure that those external links open in a new tab. This way, visitors can concentrate on your message and avoid back button fatigue. It seems like a small thing, but it could go a long way in holding your users’ interest.
High website bounce rates are a hindrance to your marketing goal of drawing in high-quality leads for conversion. Fortunately, it’s a situation that you can fix with some work and a little diligence.