One major route to gaining more customers is to reduce bounce rate on your website. Unfortunately, it’s something several businesses fail to achieve online and why they struggle as a result.  For that reason, this post is about addressing the issue, so that you can highly boost your conversions. 

A bounce is when someone visits your website and quickly exits your site. The longer visitors stay on your web pages, the more you reduce your bounce rate. As a result, you will get increased conversions and more customers.  Now here’s a key question……

What is generally considered a very good bounce rate?

The lower your rate the better. So, you want to keep it as low as possible. It’s simply measured in percentage. Around 26 – 40% is usually considered a very good rate. The rate for the average website is around 41 – 55%. Anything above 70% indicates your site is performing very badly….it means visitors landing on your web pages are highly unimpressed and leaving fast!  A very high percentage is ‘red flag’ territory and worrying times for sure!

But where exactly can you monitor your bounce rate?

What you require is a traffic tracking tool linked to your business website. One popular tool that I highly recommend which I personally use myself is Google Analytics.  It will clearly show you the bounce rate of various pages that people are visiting on your site.  Not only is it very effective and simple to use but it’s also free to set up!  Once you have installed Google Analytics, you are ready to………

……M.O.T.  your website wheels for lower bounce rate!……

Now, here are tips on how to reduce bounce rate in order to increase conversions…..

Provide Valuable Content –  There’s no getting away from this!  With so much competition online nowadays, it’s important  to go the extra mile!  You can reduce your bounce rate by producing  high quality relevant content on your web pages.  As a consequence, your online audience will not only stay longer on your site but they will be hungry enough to keep coming back.  Also add relevant images around your content to be more appealing to your target market.  The more quality interesting content you provide, the greater your paying customers…pure and simple!

Quicken Load Times –  Are your site pages loading frustratingly slow?  If so, you might be putting off visitors leading to a high bouncing rate. One of the key advantages of using Google Analytics tool is that it allows you to identify slow pages on your site.  This way, you can increase the speed of affected pages to reduce your bounce rate.  To fix the problem, cut down on using too many images on your web pages.  Delete any unnecessary plug-ins that are slowing down your pages.  You can also install a website speed performance tool on your site to make it load quicker.

Provide Relevant Landing Pages –  When using paid or free ads to get traffic, make sure your landing pages are highly relevant to the corresponding ads.  This is what your target market expect!  It’s really annoying for a potential customer to click the link in an advert and then land on a web page that’s totally irrelevant.  So, never promise something in an advert that cannot be delivered on your landing page.  By avoiding this possible blunder, you’ll definitely reduce bounce rate on your site.

Focus On Targeted Traffic – Are the right people visiting your site?  Ensure the keywords you apply around your site for SEO purpose are specifically related to your target market.  Otherwise, visitors can’t wait to exit your landing pages quickly enough.  Regularly monitor your traffic to eliminate inappropriate keywords that could be detrimental to your conversions.  By highly focusing on attracting relevant quality targeted traffic will indeed reduce your bounce rate.  Which also means visitors to your site will be genuinely interested in your offers and are more likely to become loyal customers.

Minimise Obstructing Users Experience – Are you highly interrupting your site visitors’ experience?   For example, are constant unnecessary pop-ups getting in the way of your valuable offers?   Perhaps you are aggressively linking your site visitors to a splash page?  These are two common irritating examples why users can exit a web page in a hurry!  As a rule of thumb, you should by all means minimise or avoid such practices.  My point is, the less interruptions on your site, the better you boost your conversions.

Offer Relevant Internal Links –  Pasting internal links within your site pages is another way to reduce bounce rate.  What I’m referring to is adding relevant links inside each page content.  They can be pasted around the top, middle and bottom part of a page. It will make people stay  longer on your site, providing you give valuable content. Because visitors can easily click a link that directs them to another relevant page for further details.  However, be careful not to put many clickable links into a single page.  As you don’t  want to scare away or overwhelm your site visitors with too much information.

Create User-friendliness –  This is highly crucial to reduce bounce rate.  My point is make your business website very pleasing to the eye and uncomplicated looking to your audience.  It should have a nice design layout and allow easy navigation from one page to another.  Make colours blend well together on your site and avoid tacky looking appearance. Not everyone likes to navigate around your site. Therefore, try as much as possible to make your information highly obvious and easily accessible. Also make sure your site is mobile-friendly to smartphone users.

In conclusion, you basically have to make your site valuable, beneficial and convenient as much as possible for your target audience.  By doing that, you will no doubt reduce your bounce rate. As a result you can highly boost your conversions and gain more precious customers.  Now, install Google Analytics to get the ball rolling (if you’ve not already done so).  Anything you would like to share about this post?  We welcome your comment!