When it comes to website traffic, the longer a visitor stays on a website’s page, the more likely they’re interested in your product or services. Yet when it comes to reporting on the analytical side, things like bounce rate may be higher than you want.
Bounce rate, according to Google Analytics, is “the percentage of single-page visits…a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors”.
Basically, a bounce happens when a user (i.e. a prospect customer or reader) visits your site on any web page and leaves without visiting any other pages on the same domain. The bounce rate is the percentage of all visitors entering and exiting on the same page, without clicking through any other pages on your website.
To sum up, if your bounce rate is high, that means there’s something about your website that is driving away those much needed users. There’s something preventing them from converting into customers. So for today’s post, we’re going to take a closer look at the top four reasons people are clicking away from your website and what can possibly be done to fix it.
1: The images
See, we talk a lot about having images and how having them are great—we’re not saying don’t have images period. It’s when the images are giant, or they don’t look good on a mobile device when a problem arises. If each slider image on your home requires you to download a certain font you can only find on your website, it will take way too long for a landing page to load. This leaves the user ample time to click away and find a faster, more responsive website.
If giant slider pictures are only going to be using a certain font that doesn’t exist on other desktops or mobile devices, don’t add them. Try and find an alternative, static, single photo that will both make your landing page look good and help it load fast. And talking about response time…
2: Your website’s slow
Nothing says “I require too much time to load up and work properly” than a website bogged down by slow loading times and unresponsive pages. It takes only 3 seconds for a visitor to get impatient and click away from a landing page if it’s taking too long to respond to their clicks. Only 3 seconds!
If at any point you’re browsing your own website and you encounter slow loading times, notify your web developer and get their help to address and fix it. Because it’s likely the bounce rate is being affected by the following point:
3: Your website’s too cluttered
Pop-ups, chunky paragraphs of text, intrusive animations, no breaks in text with headlines or sub-headlines—all of these can clutter up both your eyesight and mind, and the former especially drives people crazy! Not only will poor design of these applications be an eyesore, but also misplaced or misused website plugins and features will cause slow loading times.
Try investigating your website as if you’re one of your own visitors. Are there any pages that make you feel ill? Is there something about your home page that makes you want to change your mind about visiting? If so, address and fix the issue in question. It could be as simple as adding a few headlines or a call-to-action (CTA), or making a few tweaks to your site’s menu to make it easier to navigate.
4: Your content stinks
Yep, your content is either written poorly or it’s not optimized, or worse, both. Without high quality content on your website, the odds of your bounce rate improving are minimal to none. This goes for both desktop and mobile websites.
The quality of the content needs to be engaging and relevant to your ideal target audience. It should also be optimized for search engines. Conduct some keyword research, pick the keywords you want to target, and optimize the content accordingly.
Each landing page you feature on your website should have a strong CTA relevant to the landing page it’s being used on. For example, if you have an online advertisement, don’t say things like “Download your free ebook on social media marketing here” and then have the ad connect to your home page. That will mislead your visitors and cause a lot of high bounces. If your ad says it involves social media marketing, make it connect to the relevant landing page it’s referring to.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making those much-needed changes to improve the bounce rate in your website’s analytics. If your bounce rate is too high or you’re not getting the traffic your website deserves, contact us at V3 Media. If there’s a problem with your bounce rate, we can give you a free price quote on what needs to be done for your website and how best we can help you.