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How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate and Improve Conversions

If users leave your website without viewing more than one webpage, improving your conversion rate could be difficult.

A high bounce rate could prove to be damaging to your conversion rate. The more users leave your website before viewing another page, the fewer chances you have to convince them to do business with you.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss what bounce rate is and how to improve your stats.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website without clicking on another webpage.

For example, a user found your website by searching for something on Google. After landing on your website, they discover that you don’t have the information they’re looking for. They click on the back button to look for answers elsewhere.

There are plenty of other scenarios where users might decide to exit your website without clicking on anything else. A user might close the browser, enter a new URL in the address bar, or stay on a single page for hours. It’s virtually impossible to have a 0% bounce rate.

You may want to check the standard bounce rate for your industry. You might be unaware that your bounce rate is higher than the industry average, resulting in a lower conversion rate in comparison to your competitors. Most of the time, a bounce rate between 25% to 50% is considered average.

However, the “average” may differ depending on what kind of content you publish. It would be unfair to compare the bounce rates of an eCommerce site with mostly product pages to a blog with long-form articles.

Improve your website speed.

Today’s users are used to getting the information they need as quickly as possible. According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 users would leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

This could only mean one thing. The slower your website, the higher your bounce rate will be.

No matter how excellent your content is, a slow website will definitely affect your conversion rate. Users won’t even see the content you worked so hard on, because they left before your website managed to show it to them.

For example, a slow eCommerce website could make the entire purchasing process tiresome for users. While they’re checking out a product, they might second guess whether they actually want it or not and decide to leave before completing the transaction.

First, you need to determine how fast your website currently is. There are plenty of tools available online, but we highly recommend using PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom.

PageSpeed Insights is a tool created by Google that tests your website speed using data from Google Chrome users. To get started, you only have to enter your URL and click on Analyze. It will then analyze your website, score its speed, and provide improvement suggestions.

Improvement suggestions often include resizing images and minifying code.

Pingdom Website Speed Test is quite similar to PageSpeed Insights. The main difference is, you can choose the location where the speed test will be conducted. It can be particularly helpful if the majority of your audience is from one place.

Make your content more readable.

Is your content easily scannable? Can users find the information they’re looking for right away? Or do they see hard-to-read blocks of text as soon as the website loads?

Your content’s readability could greatly affect your bounce rate. This involves how your content is formatted, the words you use, and how much white space users can see on the page.

To get started, you can check how readable your content is.

If your website is on WordPress, you can download and install the Yoast plugin. It will then automatically score how readable each webpage or blog posts on your website is.

For starters, It checks whether you use transition words like “because” and “therefore” which makes the flow of ideas in a piece of writing seem smoother.

It also uses the world-famous Flesch reading ease test to score how easy it is to read your content. You can score anything between 0-100. If you get a 0, it means your content is difficult to read. If you get a hundred, that means the content can be read by the average fifth grader.

The higher your score, the more readable your content is. The test looks at the average length of sentences as well as the average number of syllables per word.

Here are some other things to keep in mind to make your content easier to digest:

• Break it up into different sections. – Long blocks of text are hard to read, especially on a tiny screen. Divide your content into different sections. For example, in this blog post, we created separate sections for each strategy you can use to improve your bounce rate.
• Use headings. – Headings make it easy for users to scan your content and find the information they need. They grab a user’s interest and convince them to keep reading. We previously recommended that you can break your content up into different sections. You can add a heading and subheadings for each section.
• Keep your paragraphs short. – In English class, we’re usually taught that a paragraph should be around 100 to 200 words long. However, if you’re writing for the Internet, you’ll need to adjust. Most people read online content on their phones, so you’ll need to format your paragraphs with this in mind.

Add internal links.

Internal links are links from one webpage to another in the same URL, including links in your main menu, sidebar, content body, and footer.

Adding internal links within your content can help lower your bounce rate. For starters, if a user clicks on your blog post, there’s a good chance that they’re interested in the topic.

If you include links to relevant post or pages in the said blog post, they’ll most likely click on it to continue learning more. The more they click on internal links, the longer they’ll stay on your website.

You can get started by reviewing all your old blog posts, and start adding links to other posts. For example, in this blog post, we have a section about improving website speed. We previously published a blog post about the same topic, so we’re going to include a link to it in case users want to learn more.

Before publishing a new blog post, you can check your old blog posts and see if you can add any internal links. This way, you improve your chances of lowering your bounce rate every time you publish a new post.

But don’t add internal link simply for the sake of adding them.

Make sure you’re adding links that are relevant and that you’re using the right anchor text. If you fail to do so, users might land on a blog post they’re not interested in, resulting in a negative experience.

Conclusion

Having a high bounce rate could negatively affect your conversion rate. It’s a sign that users are leaving your website before they have a chance to properly learn about your business and consider purchasing from you.

Try lowering your bounce rate using the tips we discussed in this post.

Need help with reducing your bounce rate? Cornerstone Digital is a web development agency in Sydney. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.