It hurts to come to terms with the fact that a high bounce rate is okay, like how it hurts when your child is not the most handsome in the school compound. Alright, you know your darling of a website is absolutely darling—cue the rolling of eyes—and your precious little angel is just adorable. Still, when you click on Google Analytics and decide to see the stats, the Bounce Rate is a different story altogether.

It is very hard to come to terms with the fact that I can still have no control over what happens to me even if I do everything right. Furthermore, ‘your website is your baby’, so why isn’t it adored by all?

What is Bounce Rate?

Google uses ‘bounce rate’ to refer to single page visits to your website or single session visits where the user spends no extra time interacting with other pages on the website. This means that if a user begins his/her journey at Google, visits your site interacts with your page in one way or the other, then clicks the back button or the specific tab containing your site, then he/she is counted as one bounce, and his/her buyer’s journey is over.

Any traffic that does not click through to another page on the website or any other page under that domain name falls into the bounce category. Even some of these factors, like the kind of content that you post, the nature of your business, or even if the visitor came directly to your site or from a search engine or a social media network, will affect your bounce rate.

What is a good Bounce Rate?

Finding a good bounce rate can be quite a task as it can vary greatly depending on the site and even its Web page.

For instance, take the blog sites. In this approach, the amount of time users spend on a given website is rather limited; this means that blogs will always record very high bounce rates because their purpose, as a rule, is usually limited to providing an answer to a question that persons ask.

For instance, if the person is interested in understanding how to promote his site for the holiday season, the particular site may post a blog item claiming to address that topic. It does not mean that they ever wanted to proceed further in contacting brands that create such content; perhaps they only wanted to get an answer to their query. 

Also, the Contact Us or the About pages that contain elements like addresses, telephone numbers, etc, will most of the time have high rates in bounce rates. Such information users may use Google or Yahoo to search for the information they need and exit the website as soon as they obtain the answer.

These people have indicated interest in communicating with the business, and they are now endowed with this ability. They should not need to look elsewhere on the site for anything, as most information is available at their fingertips.

These reasons, along with numerous types of websites and industries, will also influence what can qualify as good bounce rates. For instance, when one is on an e-commerce site, they will follow a pattern whereby they have to move through the website’s various sections as they purchase certain items and make comparisons.

For this reason, any such site ought to shoot for concrete bounce rates of 45% or less. Hence, other website types besides e-commerce must have bounce rates below 60% and be considered average to good ones.

However, it is crucial to realize that specific web pages will be characterized by different bounce rates compared with others. Your blogs and landing pages will encounter higher bounce rates than the content that assists people in acquiring knowledge of your products and offerings.

While the increase in bounce rate is a bad thing, the key to solving it lies in knowing what customers want to view so that they can engage with the content and feel interested in the website they are on. In case your bounce rate does not get closer to the desired value, there are a few more ideas to consider:

1. Enhance Page Load Speed

In fact, the above-stated research demonstrates that the number one cause of bounce rates among individuals visiting some websites is the page’s slow loading. To this end, improve images, enable browser caching, and minimize the use of HTTP requests. Having a faster-loading page makes users stay around and don’t bounce from Website to Website.

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

As mentioned, most users’ problems are that nowadays, websites are visited using mobile devices. Using features called responsive designs, ensure that the mobile experience is integrated with that of the web or tablet. Mobile-friendliness enhances user satisfaction and healthy bounce rates of web pages.

3. Improve Content Readability

The quality of content that would make visitors stay on the site longer is that the content is simple and easy to understand. Employ short sentences and simple structures that are easily scannable, such as short paragraphs, bulleting, and subheadings. Make sure your font is big enough to comfortably read from your device, Whether a tablet, phone or laptop.

4. Engage Visitors with Interactive Elements

This way, you will get the visitors’ attention and make them go through more of the content on your site, including videos, quizzes and infographics, among others. Such approaches have the effect of making your content more interesting and helping to cut bounce rates.

5. Provide Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

Persuasive and understandable CTAs are calls to action telling visitors what to do next, whether reading another article, subscribing to a newsletter, or purchasing. Specific calls to action can keep users captivated and guide them further through the website.

6. Offer Relevant and Valuable Content

When creating content, ensure that you are in touch with your audience’s needs, which should be incorporated into the content. Keywords are the key to answering customers’ questions, so aim to establish what your visitors seek and deliver relevant data. It keeps visitors on your site longer and lowers the bounce rate because it is relevant content.

7. Use Internal Linking Strategically

This helps the visitors find more related pages on your site and also navigate to other available pages to learn more. However, ensure that your anchor text is descriptive and you link to related content so as to help keep the visitors of your site perusing your page and reduce bounce rates.