Did you know that bounce rate can affect the conversion rate of your site? Website visitors go to your landing pages, considering the page load time of your site. This means that if you have slow-loading pages, visitors will leave your site, increasing your bounce rate.

So, how do you effectively reduce the bounce rate of your website? To decrease the bounce rate of your landing page and other web pages, you have to do the following:

  • Improve your site’s web page load time.
  • Improve mobile responsiveness.
  • Add internal links.
  • Consider using visual content.
  • Match your content to search user intent.
  • Improve content readability.
  • Optimise your title tags and meta description.

 

In this article, we will break those factors down to give you an in-depth insight into how to decrease bounce rate and many more. So, if you’re curious about this, let’s get into it!

 

How Do You Define Bounce Rates?

The website’s bounce rate is a percentage of a web page session with no user interaction event. This means that your visitors could either be away from their desktops or any devices or have closed their browsers due to slow loading time.

Google Analytics automatically computes the bounce rate of your whole domain and individual web pages. You can use this information to determine poor performing landing pages and determine how to decrease bounce rate so that your website visitors won’t leave your site, resulting in a high bounce rate.

 

What is the Average Bounce Rate?

There is no benchmark on what a good bounce rate for a website should be. Most digital marketing professionals find that the lower the bounce rates, the better.

In addition, there are several factors to consider to earn good bounce rates, such as:

  • Industry
  • Website type
  • Page type
  • Search intent
  • Traffic source
  • The device used for browsing

For instance, informative websites have higher bounce rates than eCommerce sites since users looking for answers leave after finding what they need. So, it’s essential to benchmark your own website against matching sites before thinking about fixing the bounce rate issues you may not possibly have.

According to the comprehensive study made by Contentsquare, these are the average bounce rates for the particular industries:

 

Average Bounce Rate by Industry

  • B2B 75%
  • Telco 56%
  • Beauty 48%
  • Financial Services 47%
  • Luxury 46%
  • Automotive 45%
  • Apparel44%’
  • Consumer Electronics44%
  • Travel 43%
  • Grocery 40%
  • Energy 38%

 

7 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

Your site speed matters a lot when it comes to improving bounce rates. This is because people tend to leave your blog post or site landing pages when the site speed is slow.

This generally affects the conversion rates and may result in a high bounce rate of your entire domain. Furthermore, this equates to not being a mobile-friendly site.

Mobile-friendliness is a significant ranking factor by Google. This indicates that if your website is not mobile-friendly, it’s likely that you won’t rank well on Google search rankings via search engines.

Now, let’s break down how you can decrease the high bounce rate of your website using the practices below:

 

1. Improve your site’s web page load time.

Improve your site's web page load time.

There’s nothing more disappointing than visiting a website that takes a lot of time to load. Successful websites of so many businesses know this and take action to ensure giving the best user experience to their site’s visitors, which means reducing bounce rate to make your pages load quickly.

If you want to reduce the bounce rate of your website, it needs to load quickly. You can use valuable tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, to help you assess the actual load time of your landing pages.

You can see which web pages acquired the highest load times and the ones needed to improve through the given tools. 

 

2. Improve mobile responsiveness.

Mobile-friendly

Your website bounce rate will be too high if mobile users can’t view it clearly on their mobile devices. If you’ve ever attempted to navigate a non-responsive site using your mobile phone, you know that it’s very frustrating.

So, one trick to reduce bounce rate is to ensure each element of your website is readily functional on mobile devices. This includes every page from the navigation menu to the contact page and blog posts.

As of March 2021, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing. So, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you may likely see a decrease in your site’s overall rank.

 

3. Add internal links.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is essential—they direct visitors to other pages on your site. This makes it easier for your site audience to go from one page to another.

Internal and external links provide additional high-quality content that answers their questions to increase engagement. Make sure to our bold keywords in your content or product pages to reach out to more potential customers and increase the conversion rate.

More importantly, internal linking is a surefire way to lower bounce rates.

 

One of the excellent ways to use this is through link building topic clusters. 

These clusters are collections of related content, with all the related web pages linked to one another. Content clusters let you predict your audience’s following questions and provide them with highly relevant content before returning to Google. 

In other words, you keep them on your site, reducing your bounce rate.

 

4. Consider using visual content.

Visual content is a fantastic way to grab the attention and interest of your visitors. Although this won’t directly reduce bounce rate, it keeps visitors on your page longer.

Content like infographics and videos, which are highly shareable, can boost the amount of social media traffic to your website. When using visuals, it’s important to optimise them for websites properly.

When not optimised, it can significantly affect your page load time, making users have a negative experience with your site. So, if you want to provide a positive user experience, add a compelling and straightforward call to action (CTA) to help drive the customer journey and have a good bounce rate.

 

5. Match your content to search user intent.

One of the easy ways to reduce bounce rate is to ensure that your content matches the search intent per keyword you target. For instance, when users search on general, top-of-the-funnel keywords, they’re looking for comprehensive, informative pieces of content.

They don’t desire to see a homepage, product page, or service page when they click through from the search results. Startling them with something they don’t want is a surefire way to make them leave and click the back button.

Make sure to have an effective content strategy with interactive content aligned with your business goals and the intent of user visits to your site. So, think beyond just keywords when you make your content.

Understand what your website visitors want to accomplish, and give answers to their questions. Through this, you can reduce bounce rate scores of your site.

 

6. Improve content readability.

Content readability is a significant aspect of your bounce rate. Although your content matches search intent if it’s complex to read or comprehend, you’d still likely hold a high bounce rate.

Remember that many people visit your site using their mobile devices with relatively smaller screens, so making your content easy to read to have a low bounce rate is crucial.

Some of the ways to enhance the readability of your content are:

  • Adding creative elements, such as illustrations or images
  • Increasing the font size of your pages
  • Using paragraph breaks and avoiding walls of text
  • Using colour blocks to split important text
  • Using several headers and subheadings to the content is more skimmable
  • Turning the lists into bullet points

The more you make your content readable; the less likely visitors will quickly bounce from your website. This will attract more leads and conversion rates to help you make more money or earn more revenue with your target audience.

 

7. Optimise your title tags and meta description.

Title tags and meta descriptions are valuable and necessary in writing useful articles. This generally informs and pulls users with a short, relevant outline of what a particular page is about. 

They are comparable to a pitch, convincing users that the page is what they’re looking for. That being said, it’s also necessary to accurately describe the content of the pages.

If a page’s content is different from what was conveyed in the title and meta description, visitors will likely feel tricked into clicking on your site. As a result, they will quickly leave your page and find other sources on the internet.

 

The Takeaway

Bounce rates can make or break your site. So, make sure to check the status of your site’s bounce rate. This way, you can tell if there are things that you can improve.

You can use Google Page Speed Insights to evaluate if there’s something to improve in your site to reduce bounce rate.