Decrease Your Site’s Bounce Rate and Retain Clients

Let’s begin this conversation with a definition. Bounce rate is defined by  Google as the percentage of visitors that navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. The experience may be driven from a search engine, a referral from another site, or linking from social media.

The Importance of Bounce Rate

The primary function of the bounce rate is to create a clear snapshot of your site’s visitor retention. This percentage, let’s say 60%, indicates that 60% of consumers that reach a landing page exit after looking at just that one page.

There are times when a high bounce rate is desired (to be discussed in detail later). For example, customer service pages or individual blog posts may have a high percentage, indicating consumers navigate to the page or post, find what they want and leave.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume you are looking to improve your bounce rate. As a general rule, the longer you can keep a consumer on your site, the more likely the user will purchase your product or service. Think of a grocery store layout and how you become tempted to walk through the store once you smell freshly baked bread from the deli.

So, the main goal here is to decrease your bounce rate for high traffic pages like your home, product or service pages by enticing consumers to linger on your site.

How to Retain Users

A high bounce percentage can be a culmination of any number of issues, but really comes down to your user experience (UX), user interface (UI) and search engine optimization (SEO) relationship.

If the UI of the landing page is unfocused with too much content, it may overwhelm your current and potential consumers. Or, it could be a result of aspects of the functionality that hinder the UX like a defective product search. This, too, would create an unpleasant experience. In both instances, the consumers will navigate away from the page and your business will suffer potential loss in revenue.

Another reason for a high bounce rate may be the relevancy of the search for the page. Your site may not be forward-thinking in the way it generates its keywords. If so, it will inadvertently connect the wrong keywords for your site. For instance, our site’s keywords include “web development”, “web design”, “hosting”, etc. That way our site is attached to these keywords in Google and will optimally pull our site up when consumers search these keywords. On the extreme end, if we made the mistake of talking about pizza on our homepage then our site may pop up when someone types “pizza” into the search function. The consumer would immediately bounce off our landing page when they realize they’ve clicked on a web development site rather than a pizza place.

Overall

Decrease your bounce rate by proper SEO and UX/UI development. Good UX/UI requires extensive market research and lightning fast functionality in a clean and easily digestible format. In addition to this, it’s crucial to establish SEO relevancy to attract quality clicks. Lastly, you need create an open dialogue with your developer since your bounce rate solution is organic and will need refining from time to time.

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