Do you have a high bounce rate on your website? And you may be wondering whether or not this is bad? The answer is, it can depend, but generally you don’t want too high of a bounce rate.
Here are some easy SEO tips to help to reduce your bounce rate, and increase engagement with your web visitors.
1. Page Speed
Improving your page speed is probably one of the best things that will help to reduce your bounce rate. It’s simple. Make your site faster, bounce rate goes down.
You may be wondering why. Well, firstly, it allows more people to simply access the content on your site. No one wants to be waiting for a page to load. Secondly, it creates a better user experience as you’re not waiting for images to appear etc.
Page speed is in fact a confirmed Google ranking factor. This provides more of an incentive to improve it so your website ranks better on Google.
2. Smart Call-To-Actions
The point of getting people onto your site is to get them to click on your CTA, and essentially to go buy your product/service.
The smartest way to improve your Call-To-Actions is to include the ranking keyword in the CTA itself. You can use Moz Keyword Explorer to help you identify the appropriate keywords, and also find what your pages are actually ranking for. You will then know what the top keywords are and insert them into your CTAs.
3. Add Media
Adding any form of media, including videos, images, and audio files, will help to reduce your bounce rate. This is because it makes a page much more engaging for its visitors.
Why is it more engaging? It is reported that the average person watching a video stays on that page, or the site generally, for 9-10 minutes. Now that not only reduces your bounce rate, but also increases the duration of sessions on your site.
4. Simple Site Search
We always recommend making your site search-bar simple and obvious. If you can provide an easier search solution than Google, that gives the user a reason to search your site instead of going back to Google – therefore reducing the bounce rate. If a person is searching within your site, you have successfully engaged with them.
It means you have visitors that are looking at more content on your site. So not only have you reduced your bounce rate, but also improved engagement.
5. Check for rage clicks
The final thing to look for is rage clicks (also known as dead clicks). For those who don’t know, rage clicks are when people are hitting something that they think is supposed to be a button or a link and it doesn’t work. If it’s not a button or a link, it could be an image that looks like a call to action. There are many softwares out there that will allow you to identify where your visitors are clicking, through heat tracking.
If you identify and fix these rage clicks, people will starting interacting with links and buttons that actually work, and this should help to reduce your bounce rate.
So now you’ve read 5 tips that will help to improve your bounce rate on your site. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, get in touch with the onefoursix team here.
