Understanding Bounce Rates

If you’re throwing a party, you don’t want to hear your guests say, “Let’s bounce.” The same can be said for your website. So, what can you do to keep your website visitors "at the party" and hanging around longer? In this blog entry, we’ll take a look at a few tips that can decrease your bounce rate and increase your metrics.

WHAT IS BOUNCE RATE?

First, let’s define what the bounce rate is and why you want to keep it low. Bounce rate percentage is determined by the number of visitors who enter a site and leave rather than stay and view other pages on the same site. A high bounce rate can affect your search engine results negatively while a low bounce rate can move you up in the rankings.

Not all bounce rates mean the same thing for different sites, however. If you have a single page site or a landing page with a call to action (i.e. “Click Here”) that reroutes to a different site, those bounce rates will be pretty high.

The average site visit lasts around 2 to 3 minutes. The average pageview number is about 4-5 pages and the bounce rate, on average, is around 40%.

TIPS FOR CUTTING DOWN YOUR BOUNCE RATE

Content – There’s no more important factor in attracting AND retaining visitors than content. Fresh, engaging, entertaining and optimized content not only keeps eyeballs on the pages, it gives visitors reasons to come back and visit again.

Design and user experience – Have you ever visited a website, taken a quick look at it, and immediately moved on to another site? It happens a lot. A landing page could look spammy, out of date, have too much text or it could be hard to navigate. Those are just a few reasons some website users will take one look and speed off to a different destination. The right design can draw in the website visitor and encourage them to look around.

Targeting audience – Revisiting the party metaphor: you always want to get the right kind of guests. And when you get them, you want them to stay awhile. Let’s say your business is selling real estate but, because of a lack of search engine optimization or some other factor, you’re getting traffic from people looking only to rent apartments. Those visitors will realize pretty quickly they’re not going to find what they’re seeking…and bounce. The correct marketing and SEO will make sure you’re getting the right kinds of visitors who can use your services.

Correct linking – internal links that are clearly (or maybe even cleverly) titled persuade visitors to continue perusing, diving deeper into the pages of your website. This is one of the main keys in improving your bounce rate: managing to move the visitor past the initial page.

THE BOTTOM LINE

No matter what the objective of your site is, the lower the bounce rate, the better the chance you’ll reach those goals. Our goal at DBS>Interactive is to provide you with a web presence that allows you to hit your targets with a combination of design, marketing, and SEO. These are just a few of the ways we can enhance your web presence and keep your visitors from “bouncing.”