SEO Blog Malta

Posted on Sunday, 21st June 2009

Bounce rate is the percentage or amount of visitors who leave your website after arriving at the entry page. These are visitors who ‘bounce away’ after arriving without viewing other pages on your website. You can easily find your website’s bounce rate by using statistics tools like Google Analytics.

A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail meaning that they are more engaged with your content. High bounce rates of over 60% require immediate attention. Below find some tips to help you reduce your bounce rate and increase visitors’ loyalty.

Page Headline

Most times a wrong page headline can make your visitors quickly click the back button. Your headline should make visitors want to continue reading. Typically when you visit a website you begin by reading the headline. If the headline connects with you then you begin reading the contents of the page.

Add Photos, Videos or Screen Shots to Catch Attention

Adding a nice screen shot of your product or a photo will cause visitors to give a second look. Use a good caption below the picture to grab their attention and make them interested. Embedded videos are a great way to reduce bounce rate since it takes time to view a video.

Improve the Web Page Loading Time

Visitors tend to click the back button if the page takes long to load. Optimize your HTML code, remove unwanted images and optimize your images. Consider a new website design. Go for a simple, practical but decent looking design.

Improve Navigation

Assume that your visitor knows nothing about your site. Assume that they want more information. Make navigation points easy to access, position links around content. There are many ways to orient your visitors and the most important principle is to make the links highly visible and relevant to the current page.

Test your Web Pages

Test your website with a group of users. Ask them to enter your site from specific pages. Get feedback based on their experiences. This will give you ways to improve.

To best achieve this, you should regularly analyze and study your bounce rate. After collecting data, implement changes to your website and see if the bounce rate improves. Also, determine how it affects your goals. Finally, make changes if necessary.

If you’ve not paid any attention to your bounce rate before, try starting today. It might help you to dramatically improve your website.

1 Comment - Share your thoughts

Logaholic on 14th October 2009

Hi there, thanks for the useful info! Google Analytics might be the most common web analytics software, but it is always better to supplement it with another web analytics tool in order to have more accurate statistics. Logaholic Web Analytics is a great and easy to use tool with features such as A/B split testing, segmentation, sales funnel analysis and all the essential tracking reports. The big advantage of this software is that it also supports log files, while GA only works with Java script.