When you have a high amount of traffic to your website but no conversions, you probably need to look into your bounce rate in Google Analytics.
I am Justin, Digital Marketing Strategist of Exabytes. I understand your concerns and the issues you face, especially if you are new to having a website.
Today, we are pleased to have Martin, our SEO Specialist, to do an in-depth sharing on how to reduce your website’s bounce rate.
Let’s get started by understanding what the bounce rate is and how we can reduce it.
What Is the Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. Even users who are idle on one page for more than 30 minutes before leaving count.
You might think the lower the bounce rate, the better the website’s performance. But if the bounce rate is too low, it can be a problem too.
*For a more detailed explanation about bounce rate, please visit this bounce rate page.
How to Check Your Website’s Bounce Rate
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Go to ‘Behaviour’.
- Click on ‘Overview’.
- View the overall bounce rate for the given duration.
*Note: We also recommend clicking on ‘Site Content’ and selecting ‘All Pages’ or ‘Landing Pages’ to see a more detailed analysis per page.
Six Methods for Reducing Your Website’s Bounce Rate
1. Improve the Loading Speed
Imagine this: you visit a website or landing page, and it takes two to five minutes to load. Do you like the feeling of waiting? Definitely not!
It is important to make sure your website or landing page loads speed as fast as possible. In its latest updates, Google renewed its focus on site speed, especially as a part of its Core Web Vitals Initiative.
Code Web Vitals is Google’s project providing precise instructions for critical signals to deliver a better user experience for each website visitors.
Besides that, site speed is also a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Your SEO Ranking Score will include loading speed as one of the factors in the calculation.
If your page takes longer than a few seconds to load, your visitors may get fed up and leave. Google might think your website doesn’t deliver valuable information to visitors and take it as a sign of a bad user experience.
Here are a few recommended solutions:
- Always analyse your website’s health performance at GTmetrix.
- Choose the right web hosting plan.
- Compress your file or image sizes.
2. Implement a Mobile-Friendly and User-Focused UX Design
Nowadays, people use mobile devices and tablets more than laptops. Mobile devices are small and make it convenient for users to easily browse the internet and search for information anytime, anywhere.
Is your website mobile-friendly certified? Check now to see if your website is mobile-friendly. If not, you may need to talk with your web developer or agency to enhance your website to be more mobile-friendly.
Talk with your team about UX design. Justin Mifsud, the founder of Usability Geek, says that UX design, or user experience design, is the process for designing systems that offer users a great experience.
It’s the way your website provides a great experience to visitors to easily search and understand your website’s information, products, or services.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- When was the last time you optimized your website?
- Does your website design follow the latest trend?
- Do you spam people with ads, pop-out surveys and email subscribe buttons?
When there are too many pop-outs on your website, users can feel annoyed and just leave. Certainly, you want to inform your website visitors loud and clear about your promotions, announcements, etc. but remember to use the right channels and methods to deliver your message.
3. Content Quality
Quality content brings value to customers and helps them solve the issues they face. Always bear in mind that the reasons users visit your website, landing pages or blog is to search for a solution to solve the issues they face.
Content that is able to solve these issues, provide useful info to the users or answer the doubts they may have is quality content.
Good copywriting that gives clear headlines and constructive explanation is important for all websites to reduce the bounce rate. Always improve the website content and keep the information updated.
Google places great focus on good content and you will have the chance to get featured snippets if your content is original, valuable and help people solve the problem they face. Moreover, having high-quality content can improve your SEO rankings.
Read More: Article About SEO Trends 2021 and SEO Services in Singapore 2022
4. Avoid Misleading Titles or Descriptions
Try not to use fancy meta titles or descriptions that are not relevant or not deliverable.
When visitors read your ads or post on Facebook, Google, Instagram, or anywhere else, they’ll click on the link you attached and land on your page.
If they find that the messages in the ads or posts weren’t relevant or related to your page, they will feel disappointed, cheated or scammed.
Don’t make users feel like they could get cheated or scammed because they cannot find the correct information. Always consider every single word or phrase in ads or posts and make sure they are relevant to your website, products, or services.
5. Use Internal Links and CTAs
Internal links will help improve your SEO ranking, but if you simply put internal links in every post or page, you could cause a bad user experience. Like I said previously, users might not find the information they want.
Extra hyperlinks or internal links will increase the chances of visitors staying on your website longer, provided that the links are relevant. They allow visitors to continue exploring more valuable information on your website.
Give visitors a reason to continue to the next action you want them to take. Placing internal links or calls to action (CTAs) in the right place is really important.
6. Avoid Tracking Code Errors
When we talk about bounce rate, we check the data through Google Analytics. But sometimes, you might get the wrong data. You might not know that it’s wrong and end up evaluating the data incorrectly. Hence, you’ll make the wrong decision about improving your website or any marketing plans.
The cause might be that your Google Analytics code was not installed correctly, or you configure some double-event tracking.
Thus, you or your web development team should always check the tracking setup to ensure everything is running smoothly.
Use the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension or DebugView if you are using the latest Google Analytics to check accordingly.
Quick Updates for Google Analytics 4 Version
Google has already retired the ‘Bounce Rate’ metric. An alternative metric is ‘Engaged Sessions’. For a session to qualify as engaged, the users must do at least one of the following during their session:
- Actively engage with your website or app in the foreground for at least 10 seconds.
- Fire a conversion event.
- Fire two or more screen or page views.
Takeaways
I hope this post will help you to better understand how to reduce your website’s bounce rate. Always focus on offering visitors valuable information and easy-to-use websites to get the solutions they are looking for.
Watch the short video above to have a quick refresh on “How to Reduce Bounce Rate For Your Website” by Martin Tang.
If you are still struggling with optimising your website’s bounce rate and improve the SEO, Exabytes provides a professional fully managed SEO Service that helps your website rank on the 1st page of Google.
Find out more here or get in touch with us today!
Ciao!
