On today’s internet, many visitors and customers who visit your landing page bounce off before you have the chance to persuade them to listen to you – sometimes even before your page even finishes loading. Needless to say, a high bounce rate isn’t exactly something that’s helping your website. So today, we’re going to look at some of the things you can do to reduce your bounce rate and increase your overall conversion rate.
When you get rid of all the excess details, there are two things that help you get more conversions: Better content, and more visitors coming to your site. In fact, HubSpot did a study on this very thing and found that companies with 40 or more landing pages got more than 12 times more leads than companies with 5 or fewer landing pages.
If you’re not yet familiar with the term, a “bounce” is what happens when a user visits your site and leaves without visiting any other pages on the same domain. Your bounce rate is a percentage of all visitors who enter and exit on that same page. For example, if three out of every ten visitors to a page bounced off, your bounce rate would be 30%.
The formula to calculating your bounce rate.
A high bounce rate is a sign that something is wrong with your marketing strategy. It can be that you’re not attracting the right kind of visitors or they’re not having a good experience once they arrive.
Kissmetrics has a useful infographic here that shows the common bounce rates for various types of sites, and this really is important.
Average bounce rates tend to be much higher than most companies realize
In fact, if you’re offering services to people, you could possibly have as many as half of them bouncing off without needing to worry. Mobile users bounce about 10% more than desktop users.
Of course, even if your bounce rate is within the expected range for your site, you can probably improve it, especially because converting just a slightly higher percent of your visitors could make a huge difference to your bottom line. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to reduce bounce rate and how to increase conversion rate on your site.
A good user experience begins with content that’s readable and legible. See, large chunks of text tend to scare readers away, resulting in more bounces and a higher exit rate.
To combat this, use subheadings and bullet points to make the article easier to read. Breaking the content up this way helps people get a better sense for what the content is about, quickly find the elements that matter to them, and understand the points you’re trying to make.
You can also use images, screenshots, or quotes from industry experts to break up the content a little and help avoid the sense that they’re trapped in a “wall” of text. Every piece of content should have at least one picture, and longer pieces should have several more sprinkled throughout.
Alternatively, you can make all of your content into a single infographic. Visual aids can help make it easier to understand the context of data, and that’s important if you’re trying to persuade people to act a certain way.
For added engagement, ask questions to give your readers an opportunity to participate. To check your general readability score, check out https://readable.io.
Readable.io will help you improve conversion rate numbers on every content-focused page that you have.
In 2013, Small Business Trends found that 70% of small business websites lacked a call-to-action and many of those businesses haven’t bothered to change in the years since.
See, lacking a call-to-action is kind of like making a sales pitch to an interested buyer without actually asking them to get your product. Sure, informing them is important, but making the deal is your real goal.
Adding a great call-to-action will improve the usability of your site. The longer people spend on your site, the more time you have to influence them, improve your conversion rate, and lower your bounce rate.
Storytelling is an important tool for captivating the minds of your target audience. It’s something that can help bring your brand to life and turn you from a faceless company into an interesting business.
Most people scan through sites to look for something that stands out to them, and you can use this to your advantage by connecting eye-catching parts of the page with the rest of your content.
Clarity is important here. Make sure your content is easy for someone to understand, even if they’re just glancing over it. Brevity is a virtue for storytelling.
Businesses that regularly update their blogs with fresh, useful content tend to generate more than twice as many leads as those who don’t.
This has a snowball effect over time. Individually, a given blog might be bringing you a couple of customers a month, and that doesn’t sound like a lot. However, when you have a few hundred blogs that are each drawing in several customers a month, it won’t be long before business is booming.
With every fresh content added, you will have a high ROI and letting Google know that your website is up-to-date.
Regularly blogging also helps to establish trust in your business. It’s an indicator that you’re active, paying attention to the things your audience cares about, and interested in communicating.
Over time, your repeat visitors should start to exceed your new visitors. From then, people who come back to your site will tend to be far more interested in your content, ultimately helping to raise your conversion rate.
Keywords can make or break your entire content marketing campaign. This is where the real traffic to your website is at, which is also where most of your effort should be.
That said, it’s important to understand that keywords are not created equal. Some will bring you visitors who are ready and interested in converting into customers, while others will essentially leave you waiting by the side of the road for a ride that isn’t going to come. As a business, you need to understand the main types of keywords that sites can use.
Informational keywords are used to create awareness about your company. Think of these keywords as your attempt to introduce yourself and let people know you exist. That’s useful, yes, but most businesses want to spend their time on commercial keywords that emphasize interest in specific products and sales behavior.
For example, “how to clean brass” is an informational keyword. Whoever’s searching for this is most likely interested in figuring out how to accomplish a specific task. On the other hand, “brass cleaning solution” suggests an interest in acquiring a physical product and is more likely to result in actual sales.
You can also look at related suggestions at the bottom of the SERP to see what other keywords that users are looking for.
Aside from improving your traffic, engagement, and overall conversion rate, keywords can help you enhance the authority and reputation of your site. Use Google’s Keyword Planner to do your research and find out which keywords are likely to be helpful. Remember, traffic alone does not matter. What matters is whether or not that traffic is willing to convert.
Many companies fail to optimize their meta descriptions for search users – so, naturally, their click-through rate declines.
See, meta description is a way of telling the world what your website is actually about, and search engines display this text below the title of a page to help users figure out if a given page is what they’re actually looking for.
Google generally allows as many as 160 characters to describe your site. So make sure to include your keyword for each page, though, just to help convince searchers that your site matches what they’re looking for.
Most consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. After 3 seconds, many people will no longer wait and will simply hit ‘Back’ and move on. This is how you can lose people before they’ve even had the opportunity to see your website. So of course, we want to avoid it.
The fundamental rule here is the slower your page loads, the higher your bounce rate will be. Slow sites can outright destroy your business by discouraging potential customers from ever buying from you.
You can check your PageSpeed right here. While you’re doing alright at less than two seconds, it’s worth using any affordable method to further reduce the speed your pages are loading at. Your hosting provider may be able to help you with this, so don’t hesitate to ask them if there’s anything they can do to speed up your connections.
You see, most people have mobile devices with them everywhere they go. So if your business website is not responsive enough to display on mobile devices, you’re missing out.
In fact, mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for search results being displayed on smartphones, and even if your site is otherwise outstanding, it’s probably going to be ranked below websites actually designed for smartphones.
Surprising nobody, Google has tools to help with this, too.
Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to find out if your website is mobile-friendly.
The Mobile-Friendly Test is available right here and Google will tell you not just what’s wrong, but how you can fix it. For example, you may be told that clickable elements are too close together, that the text is too small to read on a mobile device, or that some content is wider than the smartphone’s screen.
Google will let you know in particular where you can improve for a mobile-friendly site.
Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to change your main website’s structure to make it mobile-friendly. Some sites actually display differently on mobile devices, and that’s fine. Companies may also have two totally separate sites they maintain – one for desktops and one for mobile devices – but this is discouraged since it’s a lot of work to keep two sites updated instead of one.
Your credibility matters. Credible websites make people trust what they say, and it eliminates the buying dilemma because people feel like they’re going to get a good deal.
One way to establish credibility is giving away valuable resources like how-to guides for free.
In fact, that’s what we’re doing right here. Rather than demanding payment for this very guide, we’re giving it to you for free because we want to be seen as helpful experts on this topic. If you think we know how to increase conversion rate efforts on your site, you’re also likely to believe we know more about other parts of creating a good site – and, of course, we do.
The reason we’re being so forthright about our goals here is that what we’re doing is also what you can be doing. Every positive feeling you’ve had from studying this guide can be something you inspire in your own customers, and it’s not that hard to do.
That said, be sure the things you offer are actually worth having. You don’t want to read a guide that doesn’t actually help you improve your conversion rate, and similarly, your visitors don’t want to spend their time on something that won’t help them solve their own problems.
Quality and expertise matter – the better you communicate those things, the more people are going to listen to you.
The methods we discussed in this guide are the main ways to reduce your bounce rate and boost your conversion rate.
You probably noticed that only some of these are technical changes and the rest are all about content. (Yes, that really is important.) Even if you use technological fixes like faster loading speeds to cut your basic bounce rate in half, people are still going to leave if the content they find isn’t worth reading.
It helps if you map out a good content strategy for your site. If you don’t know why you’re blogging or how each post should end up helping your business, then you’ve missed an important step of the content marketing process. If you’re consistently focused on helping your site’s audience, though, you’ll soon start to see the sort of growth you’re looking for.
Remember, reducing your bounce rate isn’t your goal – it’s just a step towards your real goal of making a better site, converting more visitors, and ultimately strengthening your business.
What do you think of these ways to reduce bounce rate and increase conversions? Let us know at the comment box down below if you have more tips that you’d like to share with us!
Updated: 26/7/17
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