People tend to get extremely worried when they see their site is producing a high bounce rate. In case you’re confused, bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page.
The average bounce rate is 41-55% and anything over 70% is considered high and suggests that changes need to be made to the site. If your website’s bounce rate falls into the “high” category, here’s some tips that could help you improve it.
1. Check to see if your Google Analytics code is setup correctly. First things first. If Google Analytics isn’t setup properly on your site, you can’t rely on the data it’s providing. Make sure the tracking code is on every page of your website.
2. Improve the speed of your website. Patience is a virtue that many users don’t have. If a page takes too long to load, many people bail instead of waiting. This is especially true of visitors on mobile devices, which is why site speed is a factor in Google’s mobile-friendliness test. If you think this might be an issue for your site, try using
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool for suggestions on improving speed.
3. Make sure your meta data and landing page content align. If the title tag and meta description for your landing page don’t accurately portray the content on that page, it’s more likely that visitors will leave your site. If this is the case, either change the meta data or rework the content on your page to match the existing information. The same principal applies to the headlines and descriptions included in your AdWords ads, so be sure those align with the landing page content as well.
4. Create a better user experience. If user’s can’t figure out how to navigate your site and find other pages they might be interested in, they are much more likely to bounce even if they enjoyed the content on the landing page. Sometimes we know our own websites inside and out, making it difficult to think about them from a user’s perspective. Try getting feedback from people who know nothing about the site to see how you can improve it for a better user experience.
5. Write better content. Content is the most important part of SEO so it’s crucial that it’s actually good. A high bounce rate could indicate that your content is written poorly, difficult to read or simply not important to site’s visitors. Maybe it just isn’t optimized for online reading. Have someone from your target audience review the content, or if necessary hire a copywriter to rework it.
6. Do absolutely nothing. While this one may seem a bit strange, in some cases a user only needs to see one page. It may be that your content was so awesome that they got exactly what they were looking for on the landing page. Maybe the purpose of the landing page is to direct the user on to another site or your site is literally only one page. In these scenarios, pay more attention to Average Session Duration metrics to measure your success.
If you need more help improving your bounce rate, or any other metrics for your site, call us at 501-537-2246 or fill out our
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