Are you having trouble getting bigger search traffic results, making online visitors to sign-up or generating conversions? Probably, it has something to do with bounce rate. Chances are if you’re reading this blog right now, you’re looking for effective and proven ways to improve your website.

Looking at your data analytics to determine the problem is given, but what should you do to keep those numbers hitting the greens? Continue reading the blog for a full-on discussion.

First, let’s briefly define what a bounce rate is.

According to Yoast, we define bounce rate as a metric that determines the percentage of users who visits your website with no specific engagement on a specific page they entered.

Here’s the standard bounce rate graidng system:

• 25% or lower: Something is probably broken
• 26-40%: Excellent
• 41-55%: Average
• 56-70%: Higher than normal, but could make sense depending on the website
• 70% or higher: Bad and/or something is probably broken

You can easily view the overall bounce rate when you navigate along the Audience Overview in Google Analytics.

It’s considered a bounce rate when Google Analytics hasn’t detected more than one action on a landing page or if they kept staying on the same webpage for long periods of time. If this keeps happening, it’s time to re-assess the quality of your webpage content and the type of audience you choose to address your brand to.

Why does it keep on happening?

There are numerous factors why bounce rates don’t improve (and if it did improve, it’s not going to be as progressively stable as expected.)

According to Search Engine Journal, some of these factors may be:

• Slow website speed. The longer that an online user spends time waiting for the webpage to load, the lesser interest they’d have on knowing more about your business. This provides poor user experience, and Google’s algorithm likely promotes websites that have quality content and acquired positive feedback from online users.
• Misleading title tags and/or meta description. For marketers who slightly take on making their title tags and meta description synchronized with their web content a minor priority or for clickbait purposes, it’s time to reconsider optimizing. Deceiving a user by putting a different tag on your content will trigger bounce rate if they found out what they’re looking for is not what your content actually talks about.

• 404 Not Found/Technical Error. This is one of the best 3-second horror moment for an online user. Imagine the disappointment of a user who wants to avail that 50% off from your year-end sale, only to find out that the webpage has timed out. If this happens, try to figure out that specific audience’s gadget and browser choice and re-configure assets that need to be fixed. You can also check from Google via Search Console to discover the issue. Google tends to drop a website’s ranking if these incidences happen too often.

• Low Quality or Under Optimized Content. Sometimes, visitors just don’t find anything useful on your website. Whether it’s a content that’s too technical to read or a nearly-plagiarized content from another credible website, these may cause major issues which further results to higher website bounce rate. Three things to remember when optimizing your website content: make it simple, add high resolution and relevant images and address it to the right audience.
• Unpleasant/Awful UX Design. Pop-up ads, newsletter subscriptions or CTA-heavy features are common things found on a website. But seeing too much of them frankly annoys users which makes them leave the website, even us. Additionally, if people find your website hard to navigate, it’s best to have your website reviewed by a UX designer in order to find out if some features on your web pages might seem problematic.
• Google Analytic implementation issues. I had a personal encounter wherein this one client kept asking why their website wasn’t getting enough leads and has high bounce rate… only to find out that prior to handling their website, their Google Analytics wasn’t properly set-up. If there’s seems to be a problem implementing all tracking codes for your website, you can go to Google’s and find the answer here.

What should I do about it?

Here are some of the useful tips on how to improve your bounce rate:

• Make quality and entertaining content. One useful tip is to avoid using too technical words or long paragraphs because it tends to intimidate online visitors, driving them away from your site. Another advice is to maximize using visuals to balance out images and texts or you can ask questions to your audience to make it seem like you’re sparking a conversation with them.
• Avoid too many pop-ups, it disrupts the UX. Do not attempt to ruin the user experience by placing email subscriptions on every webpage that the user leads to. Try putting yourself on the shoes of your audience. If you see too many ads popping while you’re reading some information on the website, you’d feel quite annoyed, wouldn’t you?
• Make your CTA simple but not too promising. Once you’ve started building interest among your audience with quality content and good user experience, don’t make them exit your website with a weak call to action button. Avoid putting too much information that may put off the readers instead of actually persuading them to convert into leads.

• Be a good storyteller. Everyone loves a good story, but only a few sticks around with a story that relates to their reality. People easily remember brands that can captivate and engage them simultaneously. Make sure that your website tells a story that makes your online audience more involved. This way, you can gain more trust. Read more about the different storytelling trends you should know here.
• Choose keywords that generate high traffic. If you want to improve your website’s search performance, you have to invest in keywords that drive people easily to your website. 97% of Google’s revenue actually comes from advertising but not all marketers can expect to see their websites on top of SERPs even if they use highly searched keywords either organically or paid.

Here’s a definitive guide on the typical keyword research process. Let’s talk about the high intent and low intent keywords. These can also be known as commercial and informational keywords.

Commercial keywords are product or service-centric and often targets direct result to conversions, while informational keywords are keywords that are used to raise awareness. When both are combined and implemented appropriately, it improves your website’s authority, ranking, and online reputation.

• Make sure you attract the right audience. Content marketing strategy is the main key to get this right. Always prioritize reaching out to your audience through the right channels. Digital marketing expert Neil Patel even swears by this — by creating the right content and using the right channels to distribute it, you’ll reach the right audience who will be genuinely interested in your offer. It’s a chain reaction.
• Create different landing pages for high-value keywords. By creating more relevant landing pages, your click-through rate (CTR) increases. Try to look into your Google Analytics and you’ll notice that the exit rates comes around after the online users visit the homepage. But by creating more landing pages that specifically addresses your audience’s concern on a certain niche trying to find, making them easy to navigate and linking them all to your homepage, people are going to find what they’re looking for.
• Speed up your website’s loading time. We stated earlier that online users get annoyed when they wait for a web page to load more than 3 seconds, that’s why they move to a competitor’s site instead. Remember, the slower your pages load, the higher bounce rate you’ll have. Having a good website loading speed increases higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates.

• Make your site browser and mobile-friendly. This may not be tackled unlike the common issues we’ve discussed here, but make sure that your site is responsive across all browsers and gadgets as much as possible. One useful tip: It will also help if you gather data on what type of gadget/s or what browser/s does your online audience use. That way, you’d be able to determine any drawbacks that may be encountered when they come across your website.

What problems are you currently having with your website? Share your experience with us in the comments.