If you have a website, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without visiting more than one page, whether it’s the home page or an internal page.
But what does this mean? Essentially, it means that for one reason or another, your website isn’t retaining its visitors, which is ultimately going to lose sales.
We’ve teamed up with London web design specialists, Liquid Bubble, and are going to take a look at some of the simple ways you can try to reduce your bounce rate.
Add More Internal Links
If you’ve got a high bounce rate, people are either not finding what they’re looking for or are finding it and then leaving straight away.
One easy way to rectify this is by adding more links to other pages on the site in which they might be interested.
This makes navigating your site much easier and will help people to find what they’re looking for, but can also work as a way to retain visitors who have already found what they were looking for by offering up something extra that they might like, whether it be a product or a related piece of content.
Add More Content
Having a site which simply lists your products and describes them probably isn’t enough for most visitors.
It can be helpful to have extra content which lets people know more about your business, product or service that they might want to navigate to.
This could be a guide on how to use the product, customer testimonials, blog posts, ideas on what you could do with the product, basically anything that you deem relevant and that your audience finds useful!
Even if it’s not directly directing the customer toward making a purchase, it all keeps them on the site longer and makes them more likely to convert in future.
Include a Sidebar
A sidebar is a very useful tool for navigating around a site, so it’s a good idea to have one which has links to many different areas of the site.
This is especially useful for someone who has landed on your site with no idea about your business or what you do, as it could take them to an ‘About Us’ page.
Other useful links that people will want to navigate to include things such as ‘Most Read Articles’, ‘Most Popular Products’ and ‘Customer Reviews’.
Improve Your Content
If you’ve already populated your site with relevant content but are still seeing people leave soon after landing on the site, it could be that it needs to be improved.
Make sure you pinpoint the pages which have particularly high bounce rates and
regularly review their content (especially when it’s older content) to ensure that it’s still relevant and interesting and providing the user with the information that they would want.
Sometimes it’s just a case of providing more in-depth content or something such as a video to keep the user on the page longer.
Direct People Elsewhere
Finally, if you can’t stop people leaving your site, it’s important to try and direct them somewhere that might prompt them to return in the future.
Make sure that there are easily visible links to all your social media profiles, as if somebody leaves but follows you there, they may well end up coming back in the future.
Newsletter signups are also a good idea as you can then target potential customers via email in future too.