Bounce rate is all about the number of people who begin to engage in your ad/website/webpage etc. but leave before interacting with anything. It is a failure to continue down the sales funnel. By decreasing your bounce rate you can increase engagement and make U.X. better for all who interact with your site. In this article, I will discuss 5 things that can boost engagement and make them less likely to bounce.
Page speed
Web users are getting more and more impatient when it comes to loading times. The Internet is often not the weakest link anymore, it comes down to your site’s speed. Even more from 2021 Google will punish slow-loading pages, doubling the reasons for improving your sites’ loading speed. If a consumer is waiting more than 3 seconds for a page to load they are 70% more likely to move on. So, by improving the page loading speed you can increase UX while also reducing your bounce rate. If your page takes more than 5 seconds to load currently, shortening that time is a sure-fire way to decrease bounce rates significantly. The best ways to minimise loading time are compressing images, reducing excess plugins, code and unnecessary scripts.
Calls to Action
Try to include ranking keywords in your calls to action, this will boost SEO as well as improve your bounce rate. Change up your calls to action from simple “contact us” or ‘Buy Now” to something specific and more attractive like “book my consultation” or “start my web journey” for example. If you can figure out what it is they came for, you can immediately get them to click a CTA if they see exactly what they wanted.
Use inverted pyramid writing
This is a new concept we have recently begun experimenting with at Rodexo. Write a quick response to a question right off the bat then go into more detail further down, this allows those who wish to get more info to keep reading and those that find what they want in the beginning to move on without having to search for more information. If engaged readership is what you’re aiming for, it’s an awesome way to draw readers in from the get-go before getting too in-depth. The best way to think about this style is like the back of a book dedicated to a synopsis. Once someone has read the back of a book and it piques their interest, they are ready to dive right in.
Make site search simple
Make finding other information on your site as easy as possible. If the customer believes it is quicker to leave your site and search in google again, that’s a completely avoidable bounce. If you have the answers to their question try to ensure they check your site for them. You can do this by making the search icon clearly visible and by having your most popular areas easy to access from the header or sidebar. Websites such as eBay and Amazon are great at this with consumers more likely to search through these sites than Google itself for the things they wish to purchase.
Add media
A picture paints a thousand words and a video a million! By adding videos and images to your site you can maximise user experience and reduce bounce rate. It is much easier for someone to watch an informative short video on a topic or a clear diagram or illustration than a long wordy text. We suggest adding a mixture of media to appeal to everyone. Videos are my personal favourite but if I’m somewhere where I can listen to audio, images can be very engaging. Likewise, if I have poor service or internet speeds I may wish to read the text instead of graphics as the video and images may not load quickly enough, text is also very helpful for people with impaired vision as the computer can read text aloud.
These 5 tips can be used to reduce bounce rate while many also contribute to higher SEO ranking also. There is much more to the topic of Bounce rate but these 5 are a great place to start, for more information on what you can do to reduce bounce rates, contact us by email at [email protected]