Are your visitors finding it difficult to locate what services or products you are offering? Are users arriving on your site and leaving without any reason?

You must be placing lots of efforts and time to make your site more attractive & interactive, but if visitors are leaving within a minute then there is no point. Even some of the users never return after this. This makes the website designers to think what they should do? Which steps they would perform to reduce the ‘Bounce Rate’ of the site?

Bounce rate, what is it?

Bounce Rate is a commonly misunderstood metric with many negative connotations. Bounce rate can be defined as a single page visit. If a user clicks on a link to your website page and spend less than three minutes in reading the content of the web page and then they exist it will be considered as a bounce.

You may get surprised to know that most of the blogs in the world have a bounce rate over 80%. So, why and where we want to reduce the bounce rate?

There are three pages where you must check the bounce rate:

• Landing pages on which you are spending money to get more traffic through ads
• Pages on which conversions would happen
• High-traffic pages which most of the visitors check

It is true that higher the bounce rate of your site, the lower the number of engaged users. The bounce rate can be effected by your page, and also by the quality of traffic coming to your website.

How users leave your website?

• By hitting the back button
• Open a different URL
• Close the browser or tab
• Click on various link

“Generally, a higher bounce rate indicates that the entrance website page is not relevant to the users.”

If your site main page is not attractive or not relevant to users, then you can’t expect any conversion, sales or leads from the digital marketing. Usually, high bounce rate is the sign of poor user experience, so it’s good to decrease it to some extent when you are sure that your visitors are ‘good bounces’, not bad ones.

How to calculate the Bounce Rate?

Google Analytics calculates and provides the complete report of bounce rate of every web page and website. But, how Google Analytics Calculate the Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate of a web page = a total number of bounces on a page (in a given time period) / a total number of entrances on the page (in the same time period).

Here, Bounces is the number of single page visits resulting from the page and Entrances – the number of times visitors entered on your site via that page

Bounce rate of a website = a total number of bounces across all the pages on the site (in a given time period) / a total number of entrances across all the pages on the site (in the same time period).

Now the question is “How to Reduce the Bounce Rate”?

1. Time to update your outdated content:

It’s mandatory to keep your high-traffic posts updated, to reduce the bounce rate.

2. Don’t target those keywords/marketing channels which are sending less traffic:

Sometimes, by using cheap quality traffic media and targeting the wrong keywords provides that traffic which has nothing to do with your services/products which might increase the bounce rate of your website.

3. Create landing pages which satisfy user’s query:

If you are getting the right quality of traffic but your website landing page is not that interactive to satisfy the user’s questions, then the visitors will soon leave your page which increase the bounce rate.

4.      Avoid massive pop-ups and annoying ads

Avoid using pop-ups when the user enters your site. If you are serving them with huge annoying ads then definitely they will hit the back button.

Using intrusive rollover ads and auto-play audio which make the web users to turn on the ad blockers. It also makes many other bounces as soon as they reach your site.

5. Start using your 404 page

Google explicitly advises that to make your 404 error page more useful for people in finding what they are looking for. They suggest you for using the enhanced 404 widgets to include a search box on the page.

6. Improve the page loading speed of your website

More than 60% of the visitors leave the website page which takes more than three seconds to load. So, it advisable to use light-weight images and minimize HTTP requests.

7. Your website navigation should be intuitive:

Easy navigation makes the users to locate simply the things which they are looking on the site. Avoid using overly innovative navigation like a light switch, supermarket, etc. sometimes the visitors get irritated by seeing all these overly types of navigation and soon they leave your web page. Therefore, it is recommended to use simple navigation which does not become a headache for the visitors.

Well, I hope this article would found you helpful to reduce the bounce rate of your website.