How To Reduce Bounce Rate

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

– Hi, I’m Joe from Koozai and I’m gonna be talking to you today about how to reduce your bounce rate. Bounce rate is a metric based on the amount of visitors to a site that leave after only viewing one page. Bounce rate isn’t a perfect metric for judging the quality of your content, but if you do see changes year on year or a gradual downward trend over a course of days, weeks or months it might indicate an issue with your content. There’s no such thing as an industry standard for bounce rate or a good bounce rate. Bounce rates will vary based on the industry that your site’s in, the structure of your site and the type of content on the page itself. Regardless, if you are looking to improve your bounce rate here are some tips. Number one, page speed. How many times have you been looking at a website on your phone, maybe on public transport and you’ve navigated away from the page because it’s taking too long to load? Page speed can be a real limiting factor for lots of sites. If you want to assess your page speed, use Goggle’s page speed insights tool or GT metrics. There are lots of other page speed tools out there but these two tend to offer the most detail. Both of these tools will offer you clues as to how you can improve your page speed. If you can’t implement any of the actions that GT metrics or page speed insights suggest, then there are other work-arounds. For example, accelerated mobile pages or AMP pages. These are separate versions of the pages on your site that hosted on Google servers so they load really quickly. Another work-around might bae hosting some of your images on a CDN or a content delivery network. Hosting large files like images on a content delivery network can mean that the pages, overall, load a lot quicker. Number two, limit ads not overlays. Intrusive ads and overlays can be really off-putting for users. Let’s say you land on a page and straight away an interstitial pops up. There’s nothing more annoying when you’re reading a blog post or an article, or looking at a sales page and the content is concealed by ads, interstitials or pop-ups. Many people use pop-ups like subscribe now buttons to increase newsletter sign-ups. This is fine but if you find that your bounce rate has declined since you implemented something like this, you might wanna look at the layout of those pop-ups or when they trigger or the size. Number three, use internal site search. Let’s say a user lands on a page on your website and it’s not exactly the content that they were looking for. Having a clear internal site search function can mean that users stay on your site and quickly find what they want, rather than navigating a way back to Google or even worse, back to a different website. Number four, use clear call to actions. Sometimes when a user visits a page they’re very clear about the action they want to perform. Whether that’s making a purchase, filling in a contact form or subscribing to a newsletter, if this is the case make the call to actions really clear for your users. This might mean having large colourful eye-catching buttons that are above the fold. Number five, format your content in a user-friendly way. If a user navigates to a page and is faced with a large block of plain text, that can be really off-putting. If you have a popular article or blog-post on your site that gets lots of traffic and it’s formatted in this way, then why not consider breaking this up using paragraphs, short sentences and italic and bold text? This makes the content much more engaging and means it’s more likely for the user to carry on and engage with the entire page rather than bouncing away.

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