5 Ways To Reduce Bounce Rate On Your Business Website
The time someone spends on your site directly affects your page rank in search engines. The bounce rate on the site displays the percentage of visitors who left immediately after the first visit. In theory, with this kind of customer behavior, the quality of the content is questionable. Therefore, it’s always important to look for ways to reduce your site’s bounce rate.
Follow the 8-second rule
Sadly, the average duration of a person’s interest is no more than 8 seconds. After 8 seconds, the brain of your visitors is already focused on something else. Therefore, website owners need to consider how design can affect visitor attention span.
Before making changes, study how the website looks from the outside and is perceived by a potential buyer. Interview “real” customers, but try to carefully review the pages yourself. Keep this 8-second rule in mind as you ask yourself two questions:
- How much time do I spend looking for something?
- How much time do I spend getting what I want if I know where it is?
In both cases, if the answer is “more than eight seconds,” your site is in trouble.
Use infinite scrolling in your design
Legacy website designs generally assume that visitors will click on buttons and links to view new pages and content. This concept once worked well for many online businesses, but today’s consumers are becoming more impatient and easily distracted. Endless scrolling solves this problem by eliminating the need for mouse clicks. When you scroll down the screen, the website intuitively suggests the next page.
With endless scrolling, it’s important to decide how to present the pages. For example, Time magazine’s site presents a series of top news stories, while NBC News prefers to submit more feature articles. What you present to your customers is as important as how you present it, but endless scrolling can dramatically lower your bounce rate. Since this feature was added to the site, the bounce rate on Time.com has dropped by 15%.
Increase the number of objects of interaction
Marketers like to call website features “interaction objects,” but these tools and tricks are really just different ways of displaying content.
To overcome the 8 second attention span, there is one simple trick – display information in different ways. Common (and popular) objects of interaction include:
- Embedded videos. Everyone loves watching a cat climb onto a sleeping owner, right?
- Pictures and images. Boring information can easily come to life by presenting statistics and other data in pretty pictures.
- Polls. Most internet users want to give their opinion, and surveys can also help collect real-time feedback on content.
Interaction objects work well on any website. Each type of business can present content in different ways, and it’s always helpful to be mindful of the benefits a video or survey can bring.
Speed up
The bounce rate is greatly influenced by page load time. Your visitors are quite impatient, and if your content isn’t available almost immediately, chances are you’ll lose it. If the site is loading “fast enough” – this is just not enough. As a business website owner, you simply shouldn’t ignore pages that aren’t optimized for high performance.
You need to find out how the pages are working now. You can use various online tools, one of them is Google PageSpeed Insights. A score of 85 or higher indicates that the page is performing well. The tool also highlights areas that need improvement.
Server configuration, HTML structure, and external resources (such as media and JavaScript) can severely impact page load times. Take the time to diagnose the problem and then do your best to fix it, otherwise, visitors will quickly go elsewhere.
Focus on quality
While some web trends have come and gone, quality remains the focus of developers. If something pushes visitors away from your pages, quality issues are almost certainly the number one issue.
Visitors want to see evidence on your pages that they are being given time, care, and attention. Moreover, today’s consumers are extremely critical of this. A single mistake can immediately scare away sophisticated 21st century Internet users with high demands. To make life difficult, search engines now actively seek out and punish substandard websites. Of course, they will not necessarily publish the full list of criteria that they use in their selection, however, penalties from Google and Yandex can seriously reduce traffic to your site.
Common mistakes customers (and search engines) hate:
- internal error 404;
- broken external links:
- errors 302 (related to temporarily moved content).
These (and other) technical issues aside, site quality is about more than making the pages work. It’s also important to check the content on your pages and remove anything that isn’t quality content. Check the pages from the customer’s point of view as often as possible.
Also Read: 10 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Consider In 2020
Ask yourself simple questions: Is the information accurate and current? Is this content helpful? Am I posting original content and new ideas? Does the visitor think I am an expert in my field? If you are unable to provide positive answers to these questions, remove, edit, and re-publish the content.
Bounce rate is just one metric that allows search engines to rank pages, but it is a simple and useful indicator to help gauge the performance of your site. Work tirelessly to research your bounce rate, and most importantly, continually take action to lower it.
