7 Tips for Reducing Your Bounce Rate

As the role of traditional SEO markers – including keyword density and meta tags – diminishes in importance, new metrics must be identified and implemented in order to take their place.  One of these measurements that’s seeing an increase in relevancy is the “bounce rate” of your site’s landing pages – that is, the number of visitors that land on your site and exit from the same page, without viewing any other content on your site.

In general, the lower your bounce rate, the better.  Most analysts agree that a bounce rate of 30-50% is good, while anything above 60-70% needs improvement.  But before we can get into specific actions that can be taken to lower your bounce rate, it’s important to understand the limitations of this metric.

First of all, in some cases, bounce rate simply isn’t a useful measurement.  For example, if you run a website for your restaurant and funnel all visitors to a “catch all” page that shows pertinent details about your hours, location, menu and so on, there may be no need for these visitors to move on to other pages on your site.

Similarly, if the sole purpose of your landing page is to refer visitors to another external resource (say, a Youtube video or other piece of social networking content), measuring your page’s bounce rate doesn’t provide meaningful data, as you don’t expect these visitors to access other areas of your site.

However, let’s assume for now that you do want visitors to your site to navigate to multiple pages on your site – a valid goal since the overall bounce rate of your site gives Google and other search engines some information about how well your site meets your visitors’ needs.  The following are seven things you need to know about reducing your bounce rate:

Tip #1 – Improve Page Load Times

One of the top reasons bounces occur is slowly loading pages.  Think about it – if you’re visiting a new site that takes what feels like hours to load, how likely are you to stick around and check out other content on the site?

Although there are some basic site speed principles that can be universally applied (including compressing images, eliminating white space in your code and combining time-intensive scripts), the best way to determine which improvements are needed to improve your site’s load time is to run a tool like Google Page Speed Online and implement the recommended changes.

Tip #2 – Use Effective Internal Linking

A bounce occurs when a visitor doesn’t see an internal link that’s interesting enough to warrant a look, so if your bounce rate is high, one of the easiest changes you can make is to promote other content on your page with well-placed internal links.

To do this, add 2-3 internal text links to each article you publish in order to refer visitors to other pieces of content they might be interested in.  You can also make use of breadcrumbs, banner advertisements and header navigation systems to make internal pages more appealing to visitors and prevent bounces.

Tip #3 – Minimize External Links

In general, utilizing external links correctly is a positive factor in search engine optimization, as links to authority websites demonstrate the quality and integrity of your own content.  However, including too many external links on your landing pages can increase your bounce rate simply by giving visitors additional avenues by which to leave your site.

If you see pages on your site that have a high bounce rate compared to others (especially if these pages represent your designated landing pages, where visitors enter your website), consider minimizing the number of external links present in order to limit the exit points from your site.

Tip #4 – Improve Content Relevancy

Another major cause of bounces is page content that doesn’t match the visitor’s expectations.  To improve relevancy, start by identifying where visitors are coming from, whether it’s the search engines, social media sites or PPC ads (all of which can be determined by consulting your Google Analytics account).  Then, trace back to your referring sources and compare the content on these pages that leads people to visit your site with the content on your landing pages.

For example, if you run a PPC ad targeting a specific product keyword (for example, “Nikon SR3500 Digital Camera”) and land visitors on a general category page (“Nikon Cameras” – or worse, “Digital Cameras”), your bounce rate may be higher until you’re able to provide results that are more consistent with their expectations.

Tip #5 – Eliminate Low Quality Content

At the same time that you’re improving content relevancy, take a hard look at your web content quality as well.  If the text of your landing pages is poorly written, hard to read or otherwise unappealing, you may be able to reduce your high bounce rates simply by putting a little TLC into the content on your landing pages.

Tip #6 – Incorporate User-Engagement Features

Depending on the type and intent of your landing pages, you may be able to reduce your bounce rates by incorporating features that engage and retain your visitors.  For example, adding a user poll feature to pages on your site with a low bounce rate could capture visitors’ attention long enough to overcome the “7 second” hurdle (which states that visitors spend an average of seven seconds analyzing a page before deciding whether or not to hit the back button) and get them interested in other content on your site.

There are tons of these types of features that could be added – including videos, consumer reviews, quizzes, lists and comments – but it’s important not to go overboard with them as well.  Adding too many features diminishes the relative proportion of content on your page and may skew it further away from the content your visitors were interested in reading.  Be careful that any features you add don’t detract from the original goal of your landing page.

Tip #7 – Test and Track Bounce Rates

When implementing any of these tips, it’s important to test and track changes to your bounce rate in order to be sure your “improvements” are actually helping.  As website owners, it’s easy to think that we know what our visitors are looking for, but our narrow perspectives often lead us to make mistakes that alienate readers whose intentions we overlook.

For this reason, it’s vital that you track any changes made with the goal of improving your bounce rates using a program like Google Analytics.  Once you identify pages on your site with high bounce rates, make a note of this specific metric before making any changes to your site.  Then, improve your content using any of the tips above and evaluate whether or not a corresponding drop in your bounce rate has occurred at regular intervals over time.

If you don’t see any improvements in your bounce rate, roll back the changes and implement a different technique.  Over time, you’ll be able to harness the power of data-driven decisions to improve your visitors’ experience and increase your site’s value in the eyes of the search engines.

Image: L. Marie