Every company is fighting to make its online visibility, and engagement is considered the best path for this. But what to do if your website is receiving lots of visitors but they are leaving without any interaction?
This comes under the website bounce rate. You can say that bounce rate is a metric that shows the level of individuals who land on one of your site pages and leave without clicking elsewhere.
When users hit the back button without scrolling your website, it implies that the user’s intention is not fulfilled. It is one of the metrics that need to be kept as low as possible. Also, there are some ideal bounce rates that a website can sustain.
In this blog, we are going to cover some of the popular beliefs and information about bounce rates that will be useful for you.
So let us begin.
What Is The Bounce Rate?
It is the percentage that tells about the number of visitors that opened the site and left instantly without exploring the other pages of the site. Instead, they either clicked the back button or closed the window.
The bounce rate of the website should be less as it measures the user experience value.
What makes people bounce off?
If there is a bounce rate of the website, then there must be some reason behind that; no one bounces off the website like a crazy ball. But don’t worry; we are here to offer clarity on this so that you can easily fix the issues.
The most common reason behind the high bounce rate are:
- Poor Use Experience
- The Webpage Does Not Fulfill User Intent
Besides these reasons, there are some scenarios that cause a bounce rate.
- Intent And Bounce Rate
Suppose you are writing ‘What is DR’ on the search engine, and as a result, you are getting web pages related to the Disaster recovery, but you were looking for the Domain Rating as per SEO perspective. If you click on the first few results, then your intention will not be satisfied, and you will immediately hit the back button, and that will be counted as the bounce rate of the website.
Thus it is the obvious scenario where users fail to get the desired information and leave the webpage. And it must be experienced by all of us.
- Page Experience And Bounce Rate
Now let us talk about another situation. The search result matches with the user query, but the web page takes time to load, and after loading, the user finds that it has no internal linking that can offer good information to users, and they close that page. Nowhere loading speed and internal linking are associated with the bounce rate of the website.
Bounce Rate Percentage With Google Analytics
Website owners get several options to review the bounce rate of the webpage. For example, in the Google Analytics behaviour tab, audience overview, acquisitions, website owners can check the website’s bounce rate.
It will be ideal for you if you want to collect the drill-down bounce rate of the web pages, then you should check it in the behaviour report.
To check the bounce rate of the particular page of your website, you can follow this process.
- Go to the Behaviour tab on the left side of Google Analytics.
- Select Site Content.
- Click on the All Pages option.
- Copy and paste the path of the URL in the search bar.
Bounce Rate Formula
Google Analytics is a handy tool to check the website’s bounce rate, but you must be knowing how these tools calculate the bounce rate.
As per the Google statement, bounce rate is calculated by dividing the single session by complete sessions.
Bounce Rate = Single-page Sessions / Total Sessions
For a single page-
Page Bounce Rate = Single-page Sessions On The Page / Total Sessions Starting From The Page.
Is A High Bounce Rate Really Bad?
Having a high bounce rate implies that users are visiting your website but are not getting converted. Also, for the blog post web pages, the bounce rate will automatically get higher. It is because users get every required information on the same page. Thus the single page session will get higher in this manner that will result in a high bounce rate.
If you are falling under the second category, then you can review whether your website content is suitable for the user or not by checking the time spent by visitors on the web page. If you wish to earn through your blog posts or are dependent on Google Adsense, then you should ensure that there are proper internal links that should be placed correctly.
Besides the factor that is irrespective of the website, a high bounce rate is the usability factor. The high bounce rate is also connected with the design of the website, bad colour combination, fancy fonts that affect the readability. Thus you should be very careful while designing your website.
Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO?
Still, there is a discussion going on in the SEO industry that the bounce rate affects the SEO of the webpage or not. According to Google, there is no consideration of bounce rate on the calculation of ranking of web pages, but most webmasters have disputes on this statement.
However, we believe that there is no direct relation with the ranking, but there are chances that ranking gets influenced by a high bounce rate. It is because the web pages that are lacking good quality content, usability factor results in delivering minimum organic traction.
In 2018 Google made an official statement that bounce rate, time spent, etc., are considered as the noise signal, not a ranking factor. From that time, it was only believed that Google is just preaching, and SEO professionals believe that there is a relation between ranking and bounce rate. Because most of the time, it has been noticed that bounce rate has an impact on Google’s ranking factor.
What Is A Considerable Average Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate is not the same for every website. It will vary with the type of website you are tracking. You will see that the bounce rate of blog pages is much higher than the product or some other landing pages. At the moment, the average bounce rate ranges from 41% to 55%. The range of 56 to 70% is greater than average. Anything higher than 70% is disappointing for everything other than blogs, news, and events etc. The bounce rate of the website is very much dependent on the source of web traffic. The device of the users also influences the bounce rate of the website. The bounce rate remains higher with the users of the mobile devices as compared to the desktop users
Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate
By following some points, you can improve the bounce rate of the website.
- Focus On Readability Score Of Content
Your website content will be good and informative if it is ranking in a good position. But it does not imply that users will go through the entire content. You should focus on font colour, size, style and other elements so that readers remain engaged on your website. People love to read the small sentences and bullet points heading to get a glance at the website content. It helps in reducing the bounce rate at the desirable level. You should not make your users wait for the important content. It is not considered good practice to show off eloquence over the web, especially when you are delivering a certain kind of product or service.
- Don’t Add Popups
Users don’t like any type of popups on websites. In a recent study, it was found that popup ads are one of the most disliked elements among web users. You might be amazed to know that even Google does not appreciate the popups on websites. It penalizes websites that are full of interstitial factors.
Website owners use popups for getting more leads and improving conversion. But in reality, the website that gets active as soon as users enter their website experiences a higher bounce rate. It is because popups disturb users while reading and scrolling the web page, and thus they decide to quit that site. If you are in the marketing field, then you should try to keep these pop ups as little as possible to offer value to users.
- Add Call To Action
Users are coming on your website, spending time, but they are leaving without leaving any trace. It will be the worst thing that can happen if you are aiming to make users your customer. So to make this thing happen, you should add an effective call to action to your website. A well-executed CTA is effective in decreasing the bounce rate and exit rate.
- Update Content
If you observe that some pages’ bounce rate has increased, then it’s time to remove the obsolete content. You have to update your website with fresh content. Old and outdated content on websites does not fulfil the intention of users. Thus you should add content on your website according to the latest trends so that users remain on your website and also come back.
- Select The Right Keyword
Selecting the right keywords is very much useful in reducing the bounce rate. However, every keyword is not equal, so you have to choose wisely which one will be beneficial for your business. There are basically two types of keywords.
- Informational Keywords
- Buyer Intent Keywords
If you are running a product or service website, then you will require buyer intent keywords. Because users here do not require any information, they are only looking for some specific products.
On the other hand, informational keywords experience a higher bounce rate as users do not get satisfied 100% with the provided content.
- Check Page Speed
You must be knowing that users easily leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to load the webpage. So page speed plays a big role in increasing the bounce rate. Thus you should optimize your web page for mobile and desktop in such a manner so that it can load in under 3 seconds. It will be helpful for improving the page speed and bounce rate.
- Focus On Structure Of Internal Linking
Internal linking helps in improving the user’s experience. It offers users an easy navigation option to get the desired information. It becomes essential for blogs and article pages. If you add some resource link in your blog post, then users will go through that and feel happy to consume extra information. You should ensure that external links should open in a new tab.
Conclusion
So now, you must be aware of the fact that a high bounce rate for your website is not going to be fruitful for you. To avoid that, you can follow all best practices so that it can be minimum for your website. Moreover, you can associate with Marketing Sweet’s professionals for getting user-friendly websites with less bounce rate. To know more about our services you can contact us at 08 8337 4340.