Kerrie Sheehan’s Blog

What is Bounce Rate?

A bounce is when a visitor visits your website and then hits the “back” button in their browser or types a new URL to leave the website within a specific length of time. This means that the visitor only visited one page on the site. The length of time in a session varies depending on the analytic software that is measuring your site. There is no industry standard so every search engine has their own way of determining a bounce.

To improve your bounce rate, you need to increase the number of page views that the majority of the people finding your site visits. The search engines use averages to determine your bounce rate. The formula considers the number of bounces in comparison to the number of visitors to the your web page and the number of page views.

Tips For Improving Your Bounce Rate

1. Improve your website load time. One of the biggest reasons that visitors do not stay on a page is a slow loading page. People are impatient and they will not stick around to wait for graphics, videos and scripts to load. If you must run some of these, you need to understand how to order the placement of these elements to keep the slower loading items further down your page. This will allow the text to load before your video or images. Thus giving you a way to grab the visitor’s attention while they wait for other elements of the web page to load.

2. Make your site easy to navigate. If the information your visitor is looking for is not easily found they will move on. Give them very clear ways of finding their way around your site. Make it known that there is more to your site that may interest them than the first page.

3. Divide longer articles into smaller chunks. Use a “more” link to naturally lead them to the next page or label the pages with very easy to find “Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, etc” Guiding your visitors to more related material will make it easy for them to visit more than one page on your site. Any time it is possible to break their actions down into “steps” should be an opportunity for you to divide information into more than one page.

4. Give clear instructions on where you want them to go next. One of the biggest failings of most websites is not telling your visitors what you expect them to do next. By ending an article, blog post or page with a “Visit this page to learn about…”

5. Internal contextual links. There are many advantages to using inline anchor text links. Using text links within an article or page content leading to another page within your website on the topic will give your readers an easy way to find more information on that particular subject. It is also an effective way to gain keyword relevance for search engines.

6. Make your keywords and meta descriptions relevant to the page content. You should avoid using site-wide keywords and descriptions. Create your keywords and descriptions based only on the content of that specific page. One of the quickest ways to lose a visitor is to bring them to a page that does not contain the information they are searching for. You will receive much more targeted traffic by accurately describing what you have to offer. If you have a gardening website and your visitor is looking for information on container gardening, they will quickly leave if you bring them to a page about how to do landscaping.

Creating a positive experience for your visitors will improve your site bounce rate. Organize your site with your viewers in mind and you will reap the benefits of improved SERP and increased page views. These are just a few tips on improving your website.