How to reduce your bounce rate

So you’ve executed a successful search engine optimisation campaign and have an increasing amount of targeted traffic flowing to your website but your bounce rate is increasing and these visitors are not engaging with your website. Fortunately, you’re not alone, rising bounce rates are often linked to traffic increases but it’s important that action is taken to lower and improve the effectiveness of your website.

This blog post aims to provide the tools for identifying causes for a high bounce rate and steps for decreasing it and improving visitor engagement.

Identifying problem pages

Whilst bounce rate is a site wide issue, it's best fixed on a page by page basis. Given that time is often limited, start by identifying the worst performing pages and fixing them, before moving on to other pages of website.

In Google Analytics, visit Content --> Top Landing Pages

This will display a list of the top 10 most popular landing pages (entrance pages) to your website. Identify 3 poorly performing pages by comparing their bounce rate to the average bounce rate of all pages on the website.

Identifying the cause of a bounce

The key metrics to focus on for each page are:

Entrances Sources – This indicates which traffic sources are responsible for sending visitors to each page. Some traffic sources will naturally have a higher bounce rate than others e.g. social media websites such as Facebook. If the majority of traffic is from such sites, then it may be sensible to move on to another page which has more scope for improvement.

Entrance Keywords – Indicates which keywords are driving traffic to each page. Bounce rate should be measured on a keyword by keyword basis and compared to the site average.

Improving bounce rate

For pages that receive a large proportion of search engine traffic, keywords with a higher than average bounce rate should be identified and the content on page reviewed to ensure it meets the expectations of the visitor.

Internal links can help to keep visitors on a website. If there is a large amount of text on a page, ensure there are internal links throughout the copy to make visitors aware of other pages that may be relevant.

If the website’s copy has been written in-house, it’s possible that it does not give clear enough direction to the visitor about what to do/where to go next. Considering working with a copywriter to rework the content or insert a ‘call to action’ at the start and at the end of the text. For example, ‘To learn more about our products, please visit our Contact Us page and submit an enquiry form’.

Ensuring your website loads quickly can help persuade users to stay on your website. If the initial entrance page takes an age to load then it is likely the visitor will leave the website immediately.

Conclusion

Working to reduce your website's bounce rate is a great way of getting more from your website traffic. The above provides some basic ideas that could be implemented by most website administrators avoiding the need for 3rd party costs.

If you have any further queries on bounce rate, please email us here: info(at)distinctly.co, follow us on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/distinctly_digi or sign up to our newsletter.