5 Proven Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate and Boost Your Conversions.

Increasing traffic to your website is great but is that all there is to it? Most likely, you know the process of getting traffic to your website is not complete if it doesn’t lead to conversion. However, in this article, we will be focusing on the bounce rate; a metric that is usually overlooked but can make a world of difference in increasing or decreasing your conversion rate.  

What is a bounce rate? Bounce rate is the rate at which people “bounce” from your website after clicking your website link. The higher the number of people that leave immediately or after a few seconds after visiting your website, the higher your bounce rate. And unlike your traffic and conversion rate where you want to see an increase, you should be aiming at reducing your bounce rate. 

This is because your bounce rate affects your search engine ranking in the sense that, if you have a high bounce rate, it communicates to search engines that your website is not worth it or it doesn’t provide the value it promises. It is assumed that if people can find what they want on your website, they will spend more time on it. 

On the other hand, it means you are not converting as many people as you should. If you were converting, people will spend more time on your website to take the expected action. Either way, it is an issue that you have to correct. But before I proceed to the tips to reduce bounce rate, let’s look at the generally accepted bounce rates. 

Generally, the average bounce rate is as explained below:

What does this mean? It means you are fine if your bounce rate is between 30% to 70% and you will likely not have anything below 20% except there is a tracking error somewhere. Now that you understand the bounce rate; find below proven tips to reduce bounce rate and boost your conversions.

Improve User Experience

User experience is, basically, the experience of the user when interacting with your website. Why is this important? Well, when users find it easy to navigate your site, find your site appealing and can understand what you are saying without stress, they will have more incentive to stay and want to come back. But if the user experience is poor, the reverse is the case. 

So, what do you do? Make sure you select the right theme based on your industry, one that works across all the devices (mobile, tablet, and web). Also, improve the readability of your content by properly spacing your text, writing shorter sentences, using paragraphs, and using a conversational tone. The point here is to ask yourself if your website belonged to someone else, would you want to spend time navigating it? There goes your answer about the user experience of your website.

Improve Site Speed

People are generally impatient now, and if your site is taking too long to load, they will “bounce” to seek another. Most people don’t have the time to give your site the more than needed grace to load, so it is up to you to make sure your site loads fast. Thus, the first thing you need to do is to identify your site speed using Pingdom or Google Page Speed. If it is poor, you can then improve your site speed by migrating to a faster hosting provider, optimising your images, removing unnecessary plugins, reducing the number of ads placements, and removing query strings from static pages. All these things contribute to slowing down your site and you can increase the speed by taking these actions. 

Include a Call-To-Action

CTAs are a way to guide your audience by telling them what they need to do after navigating your site or reading your content. If you want them to take any action, you are going to have to inform them of the action to take; don’t assume they automatically know what to do based on what they’ve read or seen. 

Also, make sure your CTA is bold and clear. Remember as well that depending on your industry or field, your CTA might differ from others. For instance, if you are a blogger who is selling nothing and simply providing information, you can lead them to read other articles that are similar to the one they are reading or that will help build up on what they are currently read. 

Create Relevant and Accurate Content

There is a reason why readers visit your site and you have to make sure that they find what they are looking for. Make sure to properly research all articles before publishing. If you don’t know what you are talking about, best believe that it will shine through. Gone are the days when you can rank on search engines or get the right audience with half-baked content. Focus more on providing well-researched and accurate content. And remember that you can update old contents with newer/updated information.

Pay Attention to Your Landing Pages

Run AB testing on your landing pages regularly to see what works and what’s broken. Also, you shouldn’t limit yourself to just one landing page; you can have multiple landing pages across different audiences, keywords and purposes. 

Let me say at this juncture that some niches and fields will need to focus on bounce rate more than others. Of course, regardless, you should bother about your bounce rate and do what you can to reduce bounce rate. But if you are a blogger, for instance, the bounce rate might not reflect what you are doing compared to an e-commerce website. This is because blogs provide information on a page and a reader doesn’t have to spend time on your website when they have gotten the information they need on that page. 

But for an e-commerce website or a service provider, you should do everything to reduce the bounce rate. This is because it shows that your target audience is not spending time on your website enough to convert them. Hopefully, now that you have read these tips to reduce bounce rate, you will see a boost in your conversion rate. 

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