Are wondering how to reduce your website bounce rate?
Within this blog, discover:
* How to find out what your bounce rate is
* Why do visitors leave your site?
* How to keep visitors on your site
* The AIDCA copywriting model
* How anchor text links can help
Your website bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without doing anything.
For example, clicking to another page or filling out a contact form.
In other words, they arrive on a web page and leave.
Google explains it this way: a single page website session.
Please note that time is not referred to.
However, in reality, most people will typically leave within a few seconds.
If you want to increase your conversion rates, reducing your bounce rate is important.
Bounce rate is a Google search engine ranking factor, so it is important if you want to increase your search rankings.
A ‘normal’ bounce rate is around the 50% level, depending on the sector you work in as well as other factors.
RocketFuel did some research and found that normal bounce rates can be between 26% – 70%.
They suggested a bounce rate target in the range of 26% – 40%.
Interestingly, e-commerce websites usually have a lower bounce rate, whilst blogs can have the highest.
How to find out what your bounce rate is
* Login to Google Analytics: View / All website data
* Within ‘Home’ you can see your bounce rate, expressed as a percentage.
Why do visitors leave your website?
The long list of answers includes:
* Slow website loading speed. This is a big factor.
If you haven’t checked recently, search for: pingdom speed test
….and find out what your Website Loading Speed (WLS) is.
Reducing your WLS by even 1 second can make a significant difference.
There are many things that you can do to improve your WLS.
Start by reducing the file sizes of your images.
If you use WordPress, take a look at your plugins. How many are you using?
Could you safely get rid of any of them?
You could also consider changing website hosting companies, particularly if you use WordPress.
Another factor is…
* ‘Not what I was looking for’. Throughout the day, people are visiting web pages.
All too often, they arrive and think ‘what is this all about?’ or ‘this is not what I was looking for’.
* Horrible design. Too much clutter. Clashing colours.
All of these factors are off putting and will hit your bounce rate.
How to keep visitors on your site
Write clear, easy to understand webcopy.
As a copywriter and copywriting trainer I know how challenging this can be.
Here is a blog on how to write website words.
My top tip is to write short sentences.
Just like this one. Or this one.
Well OK, perhaps they are a little on the short side so aim for 16 words per sentence.
Another tip is to use the AIDCA copywriting model for website pages.
Watch this short video to find out how AIDCA works:
This reminds me that if you embed YouTube videos with your website home page and throughout your website, your visitors will typically spend more time within your website. One way of creating interesting, helpful and informative videos is FlexClip.
They are also more likely to ‘click around’ which, as previously explained, will reduce your bounce rate.
Videos can also bring those visitors back. The key is to create interesting, helpful and informative videos. An example being the marketing and copywriting videos within The Marketing Compass YouTube channel.
However, perhaps surprisingly, you can use any relevant video, i.e. not just your own.
Use anchor text links
An anchor text link takes you from one web page to another. Think of Wikipedia. Every page there seems to have dozens (or hundreds!) of anchor text links.
This is really an SEO topic and here is a SEO guide that you may find to be helpful.
I hope that this blog on how to reduce website bounce rates has been helpful.
