Have you noticed your website’s bounce rate increasing? Has it always been a little high? The industry you’re in has a lot to do with what your bounce rate goals should be. Landing pages have a much higher average bounce rate than login portals or retail websites.
You don’t want to create goals that are too lofty to reach, but it’s always smart to take steps to keep visitors on your site longer and reduce your bounce rate.
How to Reduce Bounce Rate
Here are 5 changes you can make to reduce your bounce rate and keep visitors on your site longer.
1. Make sure you’re bringing the right visitors in
If you’re getting links on websites that reach a lot of traffic but are driving the wrong crowd to your website, they’ll look at one page and navigate away. That increases your bounce rate and doesn’t earn you any sales.
Focus your efforts on bringing in visitors that are your target audience instead of bringing in anyone who will click.
2. Look at your user experience again
The way a user experiences your website is likely very different from the way you and even your developers experience it. Have a fresh pair of eyes evaluate your website for user friendliness and give you an honest appraisal.
- Is it easy to navigate?
- Is the text easily readable?
- Are in-text links a different color than the body text?
- Is there enough white space?
- How’s the layout in general?
- Does anything look “cheap?”
3. Change your marketing and advertising campaign messages
If the people coming to your website have only been viewing one page and not sticking around long enough to convert, chances are, your marketing and advertising campaigns aren’t targeted to the right people. Reevaluate your marketing and advertising strategies, which may be fine on their own, but not landing in front of the people that will respond to them.
Once you’re sending the right visitors to your website with your marketing and advertising campaigns, they’ll stick around longer and be more likely to convert as a result.
4. Optimize your content
Once people come to your website, they’re going to notice your content. From the copy on the landing page to a blog post they click on for more information, your website content needs to be optimized if you want them to have interest in exploring your website beyond one page.
One thing you can do is try to identify at least one key way each new piece of content will provide value to your visitors. That can come in the form of a useful, downloadable guide, a free eBook, an invitation to an online webinar or course you’re teaching, free templates, and more. Be creative and customer-minded as you come up with ideas to give visitors value through your website content.
5. Speed up page load
If your pages are loading too slowly, visitors get impatient and leave. Your website doesn’t have to be all that slow to make visitors impatient–with so many websites that load lightning-fast, people expect the same speed from everyone.
If your website is not loading fast enough, your competitors can offer similar pricing, content, and products or services, but still come out the winner if their pages load faster than yours. Work with a reputable hosting company that can offer you the fastest speeds along with exceptional customer service to ensure you don’t get left behind because of page loading speed.
