Top 5 Ways to Bounce Back from a High Bounce Rate
May 23rd, 2017 by
Growing up in New Orleans, hearing the word “bounce” means something completely different to most people. I hear the word “bounce” and immediately think of the music! After starting at Search Influence at the end of 2014, I learned that “bounce” also had a meaning in the digital marketing world.
Bounce rate is a value given to hits on a website from users that don’t stay on the site after viewing a page. This value indicates to Google that you might have uninteresting content or spammy content that users aren’t interested in.
Though I’d like to take this blog in my usual direction (Beyoncé-themed), I will be paying homage to bounce music, the only bounce reference in my life until I was 29 years old. With the help of some local talent, here are the top five ways to help decrease bounce rate on your site.
1: Interesting Content Updates
Updating your website content to get Google to crawl your site is a great way to decrease your bounce rate. If you find yourself with a high bounce rate, try updating your content with industry news or new services you are providing. The best way to show Google, and your potential customers, that you are an expert in your field is to use fresh, up-to-date, informative content on your site.
The way your content is displayed is also a part of this. Bulleted lists and paragraphs that are broken up into smaller “chunks” to display your information in a reader-friendly way are helpful in getting clients engaged and staying on your site.
2: Navigation Updates
Your navigation should be incredibly user-friendly so that users will be able to learn about you and your business. There should be a clear path a client can follow with your top level navigation, but not too packed where the user is overwhelmed. If there are too many options, then your user experience might need some work.
This is also true for sidebars. If you have a sidebar on your site that is embedded in the template (i.e. it shows up on every page) make sure the links here are relevant for all the pages on your site. This is usually a call to action button (learn more, get a quote, etc.) Having an attractive sidebar can help lead people further into your site and decrease bounce rate.
3: Become a Google Analytics Wizard
Bounce rate is something that is documented in Google Analytics. Understanding where these numbers come from, what pages they are occurring on, what referral sites they are from, and almost 100 other factors are keys to decreasing your bounce rate. This step could be the trickiest, but that’s OK!
Hiring a company like Search Influence is the easiest way to accomplish this step. Google has special training and certifications for their products so that people like me (and my fellow co-workers) can be masters at reading all of this amazing data so that you don’t have to.
4: Enhance the User Experience
There are a few things that you can add or take away from your site to enhance the user experience. If you currently have multiple pop-ups or widgets on your site to help push for sales, this may be an indicator of why your bounce rate is high. Users are less likely to click on these if they aren’t engaged in your site. Make sure that these aren’t bombarding the client during their natural reading of your content.
Inversely, if you have a high bounce rate but no particular ad experience on your site, add some! Just be thoughtful about it. Adding catchy call-to-actions to get people to click further through your site is helpful in decreasing bounce rate.
5: Update Metadata
Making your site reader friendly for SERPs will not only decrease your bounce rate but also increase your organic ranking for Google. It’s a two-fer! If your landing pages have descriptive, catchy titles along with meta descriptions to entice the reader, you will be guiding Google and its users to the page they are looking for. Bounce rate commonly occurs when someone has landed on a page that they aren’t looking for. They quickly click off of the page because it’s not the information they need. If you have strong metadata, Google will know exactly which user you should be targeting and bring them to you.
Bounce rate can affect your site’s performance as well as your business goals. Knowing what could be the culprit for your high bounce rate or preemptively updating your site to keep a low bounce rate is a marketing must for your strategy. It’s something that is manageable with the help of an expert digital marketing guru who also knows a thing or two about “bounce.”
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