You’ve probably seen this before: people come to your website, look around a bit, and… leave without doing anything. That’s frustrating.
As a website owner, you naturally want people to click through to other pages on your site. You want to keep your bounce rate low.
It’s best for people to stay on the website and complete a conversion. In addition, your bounce rate is also important for your search engine visibility.
That’s why guest blogger and conversion specialist Gijs Wierda has put together nine tips—just for you—to help you keep that bounce rate as low as possible.
The bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a specific page of your website and then leave your site with little to no interaction with it. By “interaction,” think of things like clicking a button or a link.
The easiest way to gain insight into your bounce rate is through Google Analytics or another analytics tool. Most website analytics tools allow you to view your bounce rate.
Whether a bounce rate is high or low depends on the type of page. For example, it’s not really surprising that many people will leave the page after reading a blog post.
But a bounce rate of 60–70% on an important landing page, such as your homepage? That certainly points to a problem.
Your bounce rate gives you an idea of how good the user experience on your site is. If the bounce rate is high, your site isn’t doing enough to encourage people to click further. Below are 9 tips to significantly lower your bounce rate and boost your conversions.
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re not sure where you could make the most profit. That’s completely understandable; there are so many elements on a website, and any one of them could be the key.
Fortunately, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. There are plenty of handy tools that show you where the biggest gaps are.
The largest and best-known is Google Analytics. Google Analytics tracks a large amount of very valuable statistics about your website, including your bounce rates.
In Google Analytics, you can view bounce rates across different segments. Consider, for example, the browsers or devices that visitors use. Do you notice that the bounce rate for the Firefox browser is much higher than for Chrome? If so, there might very well be a technical issue at play.
Take a look through your analytics and see if anything stands out.
But there are also more visual ways to gain new insights. One well-known example is heat maps. These show you where your users click the most on the page. They often come with scroll maps, which let you see how far your users scroll.
Perhaps the most direct way is through session recordings. These are literally recordings of a user’s screen while they’re on your website, which you can then watch back as a video.
Tools like these can reveal things you would never have noticed otherwise. I once saw at a client’s site that all the customers were trying to click on an image instead of the button next to it. It was embarrassing, but at least we knew then what could be improved!
If you have a web page, it probably contains text. It’s important that this text meets your visitors’ expectations. After all, what would you do if the site didn’t seem to be what you expected? Exactly—click away.
People visit your page with certain expectations. You need to meet those expectations. Make sure your headline makes it clear that they’ve found what they were looking for.
For example: when I search for “Flight ticket Groningen Las Palmas,” I see the following results:
Ah, that sounds good. Flights from Groningen. I’ll click on that!
The first thing I see on the landing page after clicking on the ad is “from Amsterdam.” That’s clearly a mismatch. I actually want to fly from Groningen. So I click, and I’m gone. On to the next search result.
A good tip for this is to use the same wording in your headline as in your meta tag and social media posts. If you consistently use the same wording as on the page, your visitors will immediately know that this is the page they were looking for.
Carry this theme throughout the rest of your text. Make sure your text feels relevant to the reader. If you attract people to your website with content about vegetarian recipes, but then start talking about weight loss on your site, you’ll lose a good portion of your visitors right away. Start your text with what your visitor is looking for.
Oh, and here’s an extra tip: once you’re done writing, run a quick spell check ;).
When it comes to text, it’s not just the content that matters. Visitors won’t bother wading through text that’s hard to read. If it doesn’t read well, it won’t be read.
Some obvious ways to keep text readable include things like:
For example, do you already use subheadings frequently? If your web page contains more than one paragraph of text, it’s usually a good idea to use plenty of subheadings. As soon as you start a new topic, put a subheading above it.
Subheadings make your text much easier to scan. When visitors come to your website, they don’t start reading carefully right away. They first quickly scan your text and try to grasp the main points. With subheadings, you create those main points for them. Even if they don’t read carefully, they’ll still get the gist.
For the same reason, I recommend always highlighting a key word or phrase in bold within a piece of text. This immediately stands out from the rest of the text, even if you’re not reading it carefully. That way, you can be sure your key message always gets across.
One last tip: think about your text structure. How would you feel if this blog post didn’t have any paragraphs and was just one long block of text? It wouldn’t be very pleasant to read, but I still see it on websites quite often.
When people see long blocks of text, they get overwhelmed and lose interest. So make sure you have plenty of paragraphs and variety in your text structure.
Visual hierarchy may sound a bit complicated, but it’s actually a fairly simple concept. The visual hierarchy of a page is the order in which visitors see the elements on the page. This has to do with the page’s design and how much attention the various elements demand.
“Structure” is mentioned here as a key term. Make sure your page has a strong structure that lets people know where to look. Guide people from your title to your supporting illustration, to the beginning of your text, and so on.
Take a look at your website through a different lens. Is there one part that stands out—or are there several things vying for attention?
Example of a website that clearly lacks focus (lingscars.com—yes, it really exists)
There are also other elements that really grab people’s attention. Think of photos of faces, contrasting colors, and animations. On the one hand, this increases people’s interest in your website. However, it’s important to keep this in mind when designing your page—to ensure that these kinds of elements don’t distract from something that needs attention more.
The most important part of your website is, of course, your call to action. The goal is always to guide people toward that button. So it makes sense that the button should be as enticing as possible.
First and foremost, the call-to-action (CTA) button, of course, has a design. In the visual hierarchy, your CTA is always at the top. Your CTA must be easy to find at all times and should stand out from the rest of the page. That’s why I always recommend using a color for the CTA that contrasts with the rest of the page. Is your page mostly orange? Make your button green!
But a CTA isn’t just about design—it also includes text. Here are a few rules of thumb for CTA text:
Take, for example, a button to download a document with free SEO tips, where you have to enter your email address. You could put “Submit” in the CTA, but that’s not exactly catchy, is it?
Put all of this together, and you get: “Get free SEO tips right away.” Much better, don’t you think?
These days, everything has to be fast—including website loading times. If a page takes too long to load, people will leave and look for something else. The question is: does this happen on your site, too?
People hate waiting. Even a few seconds of loading time can be fatal. So make sure your website is well-optimized and loads as quickly as possible.
Did you know that your website’s technical aspects are one of the cornerstones of SEO? A slow website can therefore affect both your conversion rate and your search engine visibility.
A good way to test your page’s speed is withGoogle PageSpeed. All you have to do is enter your page’s URL, and PageSpeed will provide feedback on ways to make your site faster.
Take a look and improve whatever you can. Haste makes waste—but when it comes to your site’s loading speed, that’s definitely a “rare” exception.
Of course, a search function isn’t really necessary on a four-page website. But is your site large enough that you need to use submenus, drop-down menus, or page categories? If so, adding a search function wouldn’t be a bad idea. You never know what kinds of things your visitors might want to search for—but your visitors do.
If users have become interested in your site because of the page they landed on, they might want to search for something else.
However, no one wants to have to go through all the options in the menus just to find that one page. Remember: people don’t have patience. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll look somewhere else.
That’s why you should give them the option to search freely. That way, they’re guaranteed to find what they’re looking for (as long as you’ve set up the search function properly, that is).
In 2019, this should go without saying, but I still regularly see cases where this hasn’t been considered at all or hasn’t been given enough attention. A great deal of internet traffic today comes from smartphones. For some types of websites, this actually accounts for the vast majority of traffic. That’s why it’s essential that your site is optimized for mobile.
First, make sure your website is responsive. This simply means that the site adjusts when opened on a mobile device, so it’s easy to use on mobile. Just try opening the desktop version of a website on your phone—it’s practically unusable.
But simply making your website responsive isn’t enough. Factors such as visual hierarchy, readability, and so on are just as important on mobile as they are on desktop. Carefully analyze the design of your mobile website. Make sure users have just as positive an experience on mobile as they do on desktop.
Finally, I’d like to highlight the importance of effective search engine optimization (SEO). After all, reducing the bounce rate isn’t just about what happens on your website—it’s also about what happens before visitors arrive.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s important that your website meets visitors’ expectations. Many visitors find you through search engines. Make sure they can find you when you want them to, and that they can’t find you when you don’t want them to.
It all starts with your keywords. Make sure your keywords aren’t just effective and generate a lot of views, but that they also align well with what your page is about. Don’t turn your keywords into hidden clickbait—that only leads to dead leads.
In addition, I mentioned earlier that it’s very important to ensure that the wording on your page matches that of your traffic sources. Keep that in mind when writing your meta description.
Your meta description is the text that appears below your page on Google and other search engines. Make sure it’s compelling, but also sets the right expectations. This reduces the likelihood that people who visited your website with the wrong expectations will be disappointed.
Bounce rates can sometimes be pretty hard to get a handle on. There are many factors at play, and I can definitely imagine that sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.
A low bounce rate basically means that people like your website. Your website matches what people are looking for. And Google likes that. Because the more engagement people have with your website, the higher you’ll appear in the search results. So it’s a win-win!
But just like with so many things in life, you can effectively tackle bounce rates if you know where to start looking. Start with the basics and work your way up. Try applying these tips to your website, and I’m sure you’ll see your conversions increase in no time.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.