Let’s say your last marketing campaign has increased your traffic by 15%. Along with the 15% increase in traffic, you’ve seen a 15% increase in your bounce rate. Was your SEO marketing campaign a success? Are you calculating bounce rate as a major KPI?
What is bounce rate? Essentially, the bounce rate of your website or webpage is the percentage of people who click through to your site and do not interact with your site before “bouncing” out of your site.
What that means is that the higher the bounce rate, the less likely your users will convert.
If a high bounce rate means less conversions, then our obvious response would be to immediately decrease the bounce rate as much as possible in the quickest way possible.
Here are 4 steps to follow to decrease your bounce rate:
What does this mean? It means that you need to shift to your focus to the user experience. Oftentimes, we want users to interact the way we intended. Get out of this mindset and start optimizing for the user’s experience.
You can optimize the user’s experience by:
Your call-to-action (CTA) must be clear and easy to spot. You can have amazing content but if users aren’t directed to make any kind of action, then the natural reaction is to bounce out. A good example of this is Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com provides the best content for users who are looking for definitions. However, their pages lack a clear CTA and the result is a high bounce rate. This isn’t a knock on Dictionary.com, it’s just the nature of their niche. However, this goes to show us that if we don’t intentionally try to drive users to take action, they will likely bounce out. Make you call to action clear, however as mentioned above, don’t be overly aggressive.
It is believed that Google uses “freshness” as a ranking signal. Google does this because they know how important it is to the user experience. When users return to your site for the second, third, or maybe twentieth time, they are looking for new content. YouTube has based their entire business around the idea of incentivising their users to produce fresh content in order to draw users and increase interaction. Imagine if YouTube was static for a whole year. Eventually users will drop off and bounce rate will increase dramatically. In conclusion, be intentional about creating fresh content.
To decrease bounce rates, you need to attract the right users. Attracting the right users is far more important than attracting more users. Why would you want to attract users who have no interest in your business anyway? Attracting the wrong users just means that your cost-per-conversion is increasing along with your bounce rate.
You can attract the right users by:
Bounce rate plays a major factor in the success of your marketing campaign. Spend more time improving the user experience on your site, making sure the call-to-action is clear, fill your site with fresh content, and attract the right users. I also want to add that above all of these actions, you should worry about your content the most. Make sure that you’re providing your audience with content that is valuable. As your content becomes more valuable, bounce rate decreases.