How To Improve Your Website’s Bounce Rate

You’€™ve probably heard that website owners need to keep an eye on their bounce rate to make sure that it isn’t too high. What exactly is bounce rate, though, and how do you improve your showing?

Good websites are expected to be able to interest their visitors enough to get them to stay around for a while and explore a few pages. When a visitor does the opposite €“enters the website, looks at the landing page and then leaves without showing an interest in other pages, the visit is said to be a bounce.

How much does your website bounce?

A number of online services called analytics platforms offer websites in different statistics on the way they perform. Google Analytics is one of the most popular. Once you sign up to a free account on Google Analytics (usually you don’t directly go to Google to sign up any competent hosting service gives you inbuilt access to Google Analytics) you should see the numbers for your bounce rate alongside of a number of other facts and figures.

Usually, aiming for a low bounce rate makes sense. In certain circumstances, though, a high bounce rate may not really matter.

• Your landing page could make sales immediately by sending buyers to a third-party website like Amazon or eBay.
• Visitors could like what they see so much that they take the next step over the phone or in person.
• A subscriber sign-up form on the landing page works very well.

Barring these unusual circumstances, a high bounce rate€“ anything over 20% should make you want to look into what you could do differently. It isn’€™t a healthy state of affairs to have people come in and then bolt the next instant. You need to do whatever you can to interest your visitors in looking around more.

Using Google Analytics to improve your bounce rate

Google Analytics is designed to give website owners all the statistics that they need to study their performance. Your first stop on Google Analytics should be to look at Google’€™s numbers for the bounce rate each page. You can use this information in several ways.

• When you find out which of your most popular pages have high bounce rates, you can redesign them to lead visitors to other pages on the site.
• When you find popular pages on your site that also have a low bounce rate, you can follow the model that it offers to redesign other pages.
• You can find out which pages visitors land on first when they arrive and which ones they are on before they finally leave the website. With this information, you can beef up you first and last points of contact.

Look at the All Traffic information page on Google Analytics

Under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics, you get to see where your visitors come from search engine performance, links on other websites or email marketing links. You also get to see what the bounce rate is for each type of visitor.

When you know the specific kind of traffic source that brings in your most satisfied visitors, you can plan to cater better to them. If they happen to come from a link on Facebook, for instance, you can do your best to up your Facebook marketing game.

Find out what keywords bring in your most engaged visitors

On Google Analytics, the Organic page under Search offers valuable insight into the kind of search terms that visitors use to come in by way of a search engine. Against every keyword that visitors use to learn of your website, you also see a bounce rate. You can improve your bounce rate by studying the keywords that bring in the most bounce-resistant visitors and concentrating on those words.

A few general pointers on how to improve your bounce rate

Marketing through content is widely held to be one of the most effective forms of marketing today. Unlike regular invasive marketing that plugs products through advertisements that viewers are not interested in, content marketing offers free, high-quality content that a visitor would like to look up on his own.

When a business website has useful information, visitors are likely to stay around and explore “ thus lowering the bounce rate. Content marketing, then is the primary way to improve one’€™s bounce rate.

When you have a content marketing plan in place, you could leave your best content all around your website, send your subscribers updates on the latest content that you offer and can bring in more engaged and interested visits.