Last Updated: March 4, 2022
The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of people who dropped off a website after visiting the first webpage. The aim of brands is to decrease the bounce rate as low as possible. That’s because, the lower the bounce rate, the more people are interacting with the brand’s website. At the end of the day, that’s what leads to more brand trust, authority, and even sales and revenue for the business.
Easy Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate on a Website
At ShiruDigi, we have worked with brands in industries such as education, travel, e-commerce, fintech, and B2B technology, among others, to help grow their online presence with digital marketing. In this article, we’re going to share some of the ways we have used to reduce the bounce rate of a website.
Have a Look at Organic Traffic Data
With the help of the website’s analytics platform, have a look at the data available for the organic traffic the website is getting through search engines. If the webpages are ranking for relevant keywords, the bounce rate of the organic traffic will be on the lower end (we’ve seen it at low as 1%). If it’s on the higher end, we suggest you have a look at the keywords you are getting traffic from, which webpages are ranking for the keyword, and whether the keywords to webpage mapping makes sense from a user perspective.
Re-Analyze Your PPC Campaign Management Strategy
PPC campaigns tend to increase the bounce rate of a website. Hence, we recommend you have a look at the following aspects of the campaigns:
- Keyword to asset mapping to see if the mapping makes sense
- Search Query Reports (SQRs) of search campaigns to analyze if there are any irrelevant searches triggering an ad
- Add irrelevant placements as exclusions in display campaigns
You can also link your Google Analytics account to the Google Ads account for more accurate information about the bounce rate of different campaigns.
Invest in an SSL Certificate
One of the many advantages of an SSL certificate is building trust as it provides a level of website security. There are a couple of ways users can tell if a website does not have an SSL certificate in place:
- As soon as they come onto the website, a message pops up on their screen warning them that the website is not safe, and offers them to go back to the site they were on
- Right next to the URL on the left, the user can see the phrase ‘Not Secure’
These two things can lead to the user dropping off of the website as they do not want to compromise their privacy and safety. This will lead to a rise in bounce rate. In fact, for an entertainment blog that we have worked with, simply implementing an SSL certificate helped bring down the bounce rate from 81% to 10% month over month.
Improve the Webpage Loading Speed
Users are impatient. They don’t like to wait for a webpage to load. Hence, if the webpage loading speed isn’t up to the mark, the user loses interest and drops off. This can be a reason for an increase in bounce rate.
In order to test if this is the case for your website, have a look at which webpages have the highest bounce rate. Then enter that URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool provides an accurate time on the page load speed along with some other metrics.
Is Your Webpage Mobile Friendly?
As per a report by Statistica, “In the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 50.81 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.”
With the usage of mobile phones on the rise, it is important that your website is optimized to properly function for mobile visitors. A poorly formatted webpage on a mobile phone is a key reason for an increase in bounce rate for a website.
Put the User’s Interest First
How the user perceives the website is crucial with how they interact with the brand and website. Hence, while creating webpages, keep asking yourself one question – “Is this something the target audience is interested in?” If the answer is no, you may want to leave that portion out. That’s because, if you’re offering something the user is not interested in on your website, they’re likely going to drop off.
Don’t Have too Many Buttons and Hyperlinks on the Webpages
At times, businesses want to optimize a webpage for optimum results. One way that may be done is by adding a lot of buttons and hyperlinks on the webpage. This may overwhelm or confuse the user, which will make them more likely to drop off.
Analyze the Amount of Videos and Images on Your Webpage
Having images and videos are a great way to improve user experience by providing a visual aspect to the information you want to convey. But, having too many in a single webpage or files that take long to download (leading to an increase in webpage loading time) can lead to people dropping off before the page even completes loading.
Don’t Push too Many Ads
Ads are a great way for websites to earn additional revenue. But, having too many ads ruins user experience on the website. Being bombarded with a lot of ads will not only lead to a higher bounce rate, but will also make it more likely that users won’t return to your website in the future.
Looking for a digital marketing agency that offers quality services? Reach out to ShiruDigi’s team of experts today.
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