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How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate
In order to determine how to reduce your bounce rate – or to know why you need to reduce your bounce rate – you must first know what a bounce is. A bounce refers to a customer who visits your website and then leaves before they take any other action. A bounce rate refers to the overall rate of how many visitors on your website “bounce”. If you have a high bounce rate, it means that a large number of your visitors bounce. If you have a low number, it means the majority of your visitors stay on your website.
Is Bounce Rate Important?
Your bounce rate is important, for a couple of reasons. First, if you make money off your website, the longer a customer stays means the more likely you are to make money. For example, if you run Google ads, the more pages a visitor goes on, the more likely they are to click an ad. This is similarly true if you do affiliate marketing. Visitors who stay on longer are more likely to click on one of your affiliate links, make a purchase and then you’ll make an affiliate sale. And if you sell products, the more products of yours they see, the more likely they are to buy something.
The other reason bounce rate is important is because Google uses it when they determine who shows up the highest in Google searches. So it is really important you have a good bounce rate because you want to show as high in Google as possible.
How to Determine Your Website’s Bounce Rate
So how do you know if your website, or specific pages on your website, have a high bounce rate? You can check this out with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a great tool that anyone with a website or blog should use to find out ways you can improve your website. You can see where your traffic comes from, which pages gets the most traffic, etc. And you can also see what your bounce rates are. And the great about Google Analytics is that it is absolutely free! Get started by clicking here.
How to Improve Your Website’s Bounce Rate
So let’s say you have checked your Google Analytics and you have determined you want to improve your bounce rate. How do you go about improving your bounce rate? Some people will give you general advice like “improve your content”. And while improving your content could lead to a lower bounce rate, I’m not a big fan of general advice. After all, what exactly do you do with this kind of advice? If you knew what kind of content would get a lower bounce rate, then you’d probably already have it, right? And the content may not even be the problem. There are a lot of other culprits, too.
So that’s why we’ve decided to give you ten specific things you could do that could help your bounce rate. Hopefully at least a few of these will help you reduce your bounce rate, get you a higher ranking in Google and help grow your business or blog.
1. Speed Up Your Website
Statistics show that slow websites have higher bounce rates than faster websites. Websites that take more than 3 seconds to lose lose around 40% of their traffic. And it makes sense, right? I mean, if you click on a website and it takes forever to load, you might just press backspace and abandon the site. So speed is definitely something you need to think about when you want to improve your bounce rate.
If you run a WordPress website, you can see tips on how to speed up your website here. If you run a Joomla website, you can see tips on how to speed up your website here.
2. Run a Limited Time Offer
Now this one really matters if you run an eCommerce website. But if you do, one way to make someone feel that they must purchase your product now is to run a limited time offer on your website. We go over how to offer coupons here.
3. Offer a Live Chat
Offering a live chat can be a great way to reduce the bounce rate on your website. Just by starting a conversation with someone, they may be more likely to stay on your website.
And perhaps your bounce rate is due to people not having their questions answered. A chat box could solve this.
In the past, this might seem hard to do. After all, do you want to hire a staff to chat with customers? Well, this is not an issue anymore because there are now automated chat boxes. Here at Website Tips and Tutorials, we recommend ActiveChat. With ActiveChat, you’ll be able to program in answers and then the chat box will work automatically. That way, you can essentially chat with your customers at all times without actually having to do it. It is a great and relatively easy trick to reduce your bounce rate.
4. Use Videos
One way to make sure you keep people interested is to include videos. Videos can keep people engaged with your site. If you want to make your own videos, any easy way to do it would be Wideo. You can also get your videos edited for you with EditSmart.
5. Get OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a wonderful tool that can help you stop a website visit from becoming a bounce. OptinMonster’s signature Exit-Intent technology tracks when a user is about to leave your website. So when that happens, you’ll be able to send them a targeted message at that precise motion. This could be a popup where you can give them a freebie if they sign up for your email. For example, let’s say you have a website for organic beauty products. You could have a popup so that if they sign up for your email, you will give them instructions on how to make their own organic soap. That could keep someone on your website
The other thing you could do would be to give them a coupon. Perhaps the reason they are leaving your website is because you sell products and the visitor thinks they are too expensive. With a coupon, perhaps they will stay on your website and buy your product. So as you can see, getting OptinMonster can be a great tool to help reduce your bounce rate.
6. Add More Internal Links
If you want to reduce your bounce rate, then you want to keep them on your website and make sure they do something before leaving. Getting them to click on an internal link can do that.
Now, what I mean by internal link is a link to another page or blog entry on your website. For example, you can include other similar related blog entries at the end for further reading. Like if I told you that you are interested in reducing your bounce rate, you should also read our tips on how to reduce your cart abandonment by clicking here. See what I did here?
You can also just naturally link to it when you’re talking. Like, let’s say you’re writing a blog entry about the best new tablets of 2019. If you’ve already written a blog entry about a specific tablet, then it makes sense to link to that article, right? So you can just organically add internal links when it makes or put them at the end.
7. Add Related Products
You can also add internal links without actually having to write them into a blog entry by having a related product feature. This is a great tool if you run an eCommerce website. If you use WooCommerce, you can add the Recommendation Engine plugin. Here are some instructions on how to add product recommendations if you are a Weebly customer, and here are instructions if you are a BigCommerce user.
8. Make Your Website Responsive
One reason a visitor could leave your website would be that your website didn’t look right on the device they were using. It’s important to have a website that looks good on all devices: desktops, laptops, cell phones, tablets, etc.
Now, you may already have that. Check out your website on different devices you have and see how it looks. Is it really, say, small on your cell phone? Then you might need a change.
If you have a WordPress website and you want to change your theme to a responsive theme. You can do this by clicking here. Then, type “responsive WordPress” in the search term and responsive WordPress themes will show up.
9. Add Search Function
It’s important for your website to have a search function. This way, if someone stumbles upon your page and don’t see what they’re looking for, they’ll have the ability to search for a different item. If you have WordPress, a search function is usually added automatically. But if you want a better search option to reduce bounce rate, consider getting Relevanssi.
10. Bring In More Interested Customers
One way to reduce your bounce rate would be to make sure you can get more customers on your website who are interested in what you have to say. If they go on your website and don’t bounce, then your overall bounce rating percentage will reduce.
Now, that may seem easier said that done. But one actionable way you can achieve this is to do email marketing. Let people sign up for a newsletter and then send out a newsletters letting them know about your latest blogs, deals, etc. The people who then click on that newsletter and then go to your website will obviously be interested in what you have to say. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed up for the newsletter or clicked on the link in the newsletter. You can see this for yourself by signing up for a free trial of Constant Contact.
