Got a High Bounce Rate? Try Fixing These 5 Things

Your website’s bounce rate is an indicator of how your website impacts viewers at first glance – do they stay or do they go?

If your bounce rate is high, take a closer look at your website design, content, and usability in order to improve your user experience. As you make changes you’ll likely be rewarded with increased conversion rates as well as reduced bounce rates.

With that in mind, here are five elements we look to correct when we’re analyzing a website or a page with a high bounce rate:

Ineffective Content

Your web content should follow through on any promises made in your PPC ads, website name, or keywords.

If you promise advice on fixing gutters, but only provide sales copy for your gutter cleaning services, you’ll have a high bounce rate.   In addition to delivering on your promises, make sure your copy is well written and has been edited for spelling and grammar errors.

Keyword Stuffing

It’s annoying to read a paragraph that uses the same keywords or phrases twenty-eight times in a row, especially if the copy doesn’t provide any useful information in between the keywords. This particular practice of repeating the same keywords again and again is known as keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is a losers game, Not only are the search engines getting much smarter about not rewarding this type of behavior,  but visitors hate it and will bounce off your site.

Slow Load Time

You’ve got less than 5 seconds to get the majority of your page content in front of your viewer’s eyes. If it takes longer than that for your page to load, most visitors are already gone.

You can speed up your load time by using cascading style sheets, removing unnecessary or overly complex animations and images, keeping pages relatively short, and keeping table use to a minimum.

Not Designed for Usability

Your bounce rate will be high if:

• Your website is difficult to navigate
• It doesn’t provide clear direction on how the visitor can easily get to the page(s) they’re interested in
• It doesn’t present clear calls to action

Make it easy for users to do, what they want to do, by keeping actions simple and obvious.  Remember you can’t make your visitors buy, or sign-up or contact you.  But you can make it easy  for them to do it, once they’re ready to move forward.

Ineffective Design

Colors, white space, animations, and layout all contribute to effective website design. Be on the lookout for:

• Harsh colors that hurt the eyes.
• Too much, too little, or ineffectively placed white space
• Little singing spiders that follow the visitor down the page, music that starts playing the moment the visitor hits the home page, or talking images that the visitor can’t control … any potentially annoying design elements that are out of the visitors control

All of the above elements can create an user experience that will send visitors bouncing off to other sites.

Keeping visitors on your site really just requires an understanding of their needs and desires.  A high bounce rate is not a permanent condition.  It’s something you can improve, page by page, on your website.

Want a Free Idea for improving your Bounce Rate? Give us a call, we’re up to the challenge.