What Your Website’s ‘Bounce Rate’ Means for Your Business
If you’ve already started a simple link building campaign for your website, you probably get daily visitors who either followed your link or found your business through a social media network. If you closely monitor your traffic using analytics tools, and if you use Google Analytics in particular, you see a column that shows the “bounce rate” of your traffic. Oftentimes business owners tend to overlook this analytics feature, but it actually says a lot about the effectiveness of your website.
What is “bounce rate” and why do your visitors “bounce”?
Bounce rate measures the number of visitors who immediately leave as soon as they land on your website. This usually happens when your website does not have what they’re looking for.
Visitors usually “bounce” from three key areas of your website: home page, navigation pages, and content pages. Content and navigation pages normally have higher bounce rates than your home page or conversion pages. On the other hand, if your homepage and conversion pages have recorded high bounce rates, there might be something wrong with them in general; either you need to tweak your website copy, redesign your website, put a compelling offer, make your calls to action appear more prominent, or even install a blog or forums to make your website more interactive. Critical pages such as the home page and the conversion page should immediately engage your visitors, cater to their interests, and encourage them to visit other pages on your site. Your critical pages serve as portals to your website, so when your visitors leave the gate immediately, you need to investigate why.
A High Bounce Rate May Mean Lost Sales
A percentage of your bounce rate probably comprises of people who look for valuable information that you can easily provide through quality content; however, if some of these people include those who actually have the intention to buy your products or engage your services, you may be losing sales.
Website visitors who are ready to make a purchase have very little time to waste. Unlike someone who needs to be persuaded, interested buyers are ready to go.
How To Lower Your Bounce Rate
When your bounce rate reaches as high as 50%, look at how your content affects your visitors. The keywords that you embed in your content must attract the right kind of people: those who actually search for them and find them valuable.
See if your visitors interact with your website content, and whether they flip through other pages as well. Check if your pages provide all the necessary information that your target customers normally look for.
Another way to lower your bounce rate is to simplify the steps that your visitors need to take once they decide to respond to your call to action. Simple steps provide convenience that most people like in most online transactions.
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