If you’re struggling to push traffic to your website, grow more leads, or get more clients, it may be that your bounce rate is too high, meaning, site visitors and clients who go to your landing page ‘bounce off’ before you can convert them.

When a visitor lands on any page of your site and then exits without clicking on any other pages that add to your bounce rate.

As opposed to all your other metrics, increasing your bounce rate isn’t an increase you want. A reduction in your bounce rate will help your rate of conversion.

When you see a high bounce rate on any of your landing pages, it’s an indication that your website and content marketing strategy are due a critical overhaul, because a high bounce rate is a sign that something is awry with your strategy, either you’re not enticing the right kind of visitor or they don’t have a good user experience when they land.

Update Obsolete Content

Does your site still have content from 2000 informing visitors of the merits of Friends Reunited?  Obviously, that’s an exaggeration to prove a point, but it does highlight the need to keep older high-traffic posts up-to-date to lower your bounce rate.

Avoid pop-up, unless they’re exit-intent

As a rule of thumb, pop-ups are not good for the visitor experience and should be avoided.

A case can be made for them when you’re using an exit-intent tool such as, OptinMonster or Bounce Exchange, which takes advantage of mouse tracking to recognise when a visitor is about to bounce and reveals a pop-up to reduce this.

OptinMonster reckon that 70% of visitors abandon a site after one page and never come back!

Write less text dense paragraphs (shorter for short)

Lucid, vigorous and brief, as Peter Fryer once advised, and this axiom still holds true, as Facebook whittles away our attention spans it is becoming even more important for marketers to write concisely.

If you write long paragraphs to transfer simple points, readers will bounce.

Advancing your copywriting skills will reduce your bounce, and lift conversion and click-through rates. People might enjoy your writing too.

Translate your site

This may seem obvious and there are sites out there that have a drop-down menu with language features on it, the problem is they don’t do anything. If you have clients or visitors from overseas make sure you cater to your international market.

There are plenty of multi-lingual plugins available, which can translate a site into a number of different languages. The bounce rate for international traffic has been known to drop by as much as 35%.

Make your search box easy to spot and use

Steve Krug, in his, Don’t Make Me Think: Revisited, explains very well, how many people are search-oriented and they will scope out a search box as soon as they visit a website. Don’t make it hard for them, make it clear, visible and usable.

 

Make your 404 work for you

Make it basic, keep it familiar, but give people direction.

Google gives some great advice on what a 404 error page should do, in that it should be effective in helping visitors to find what they’re looking for. In essence, it’s this; don’t be lazy, don’t use the default but customise your help, use the 404 enhanced widgets to add a search box to your 404 error page.

Reduce broken links

Broken links cause poor user experience, driving your bounce rates up, it’s that simple.

Using webmaster tools, or a scraper such as Beam Us Up, Screaming Frog, or WildShark can identify all of your broken links and fix many of them.

External links should open in a new window

If you are writing a successful; or popular blog, it’s quite likely that a big percentage of your bounce rate is coming from visitors clicking on external links in your posts.

WordPress has a plugin that will open automatically all of your external links using a new tab.

Page loading speed

People want to find answers as quickly as possible and research has shown that visitors really care about the loading speed of a page.  Almost 60% of site visitors will abandon a landing page that takes more than 3 seconds to load, that’s why search engines factor page load speed into rankings.

If you’re still unsure, uncertain, or would just generally like a bit more advice on your website worries, contact a member of our team today. We’re ready to help you make the most out of your digital marketing.