Most people or businesses that track their website’s success
have probably heard about their website’s ‘bounce rate’. The bounce rate measures
the percentage of visitors who clicked away from your website (back to search
or to another website) after they first landed on a page. When you have a high
bounce rate and customers ‘click and go’, search engines begin to look at your
content’s quality as questionable and your rankings can suffer.
So what can you do to improve your bounce rate, retain
customers and get more conversions?
Understand Your Users
Attention Span
According to the latest studies, the human attention span is
now eight seconds.
That’s right… Your website will lose your visitor’s focus
after about eight seconds. In order to optimize your website for a lower bounce
rate, you have to keep this in the forefront of every decision you make for
your website.
For each section of your website, break down how long it
takes you to find what you’re looking for and how long it takes you to figure
out what to do after you’ve found it. For example, if you are a bicycle shop
and looking for gears, does it take you less than eight seconds to find the
gears from your homepage? Do you have an easy to find call-to-action for
purchasing the gears?
In both cases, if it takes you more than eight seconds, your
website is in trouble.
Create Engaging Pages
In order to counter the eight-second attention span of your
visitors, use engagement objects such as:
- Embedded
videos - These videos will keep visitors on the page longer and give them
valuable information without exhausting too much brainpower.
- Pictures
and images – Images draw the eye in and keeps it moving down the page. Even dull information can
be exciting to digest with the help of interesting graphics.
- Polls
and Testimonials - Most Internet users love to express their opinion. Polls
and testimonials can also help you gather real-time feedback on your
business and website.
Engagement
objects work well on almost any website. Every type of business can benefit
from a video and images on their site. Standing out from your competition is
also easy with these content pieces.
Ensure Your Site Runs
Smoothly
One of
the major impacts on bounce rate is your site’s performance, and the biggest
issue there would be page load times. Your visitors are incredibly impatient,
and if your content isn’t almost immediately accessible, they are likely to
click away.
Server configuration, HTML structure and external resources
(like media files and JavaScript) can all seriously influence page-loading
times. If your website is loading slowly,
you need to diagnose the problem and fix it as soon as possible.
More technical issues that could be causing bounces could
include 404 errors, broken external links, 302 errors and more. Make sure your
website has all of the bugs worked out so that your visitors don’t have any
superficial reason to leave your site early.
Conclusion
While these issues don’t cover all of the reasons that
visitors might click out of your website, they are good places to start looking
to assess what needs to be done to your website.
Bounce rate is only one search engine optimization tactic that search engines use to
rank your pages, but it is a simple, useful indicator to help you evaluate your
website’s performance. Work to continuously drive your bounce rate down and
you’ll see your conversions start to rise.
For help enhancing your website performance and engaging
your visitors, contact Sales & Marketing Technologies today.