Everything You Need to Know About Bounce Rate
If you use Google Analytics to track traffic, conversions, and other activities on your website or online store, you may have come across the “bounce rate” tab—or “afvisningsprocent, ” as it’s called in Danish.
But what exactly is the bounce rate? Why is it important to pay attention to it? And how can you lower the bounce rate on your website or online store? You can read much more about this in this post.
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What is the bounce rate?
The bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors view only one page on your website and do not take any other actions, such as filling out a contact form, clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.
For example, if you have a bounce rate of 52.68%, that means 52.68% of your visitors leave your website without visiting any other pages besides the one they clicked on in the search results.
Avoid Digital Revolving Doors—Here’s Why Your Bounce Rate Matters
The bounce rate is an indicator of how effective and user-friendly your website is.
A low bounce rate indicates that your users find it easy to navigate your website. Conversely, a high bounce rate may indicate that your pages aren’t compelling enough to capture people’s interest—and this can be a critical sign that your website:
- Do not meet their expectations
- Having problems with content, usability, or design
For the sake of example, let’s compare a website to a physical store. The store has several departments—much like your website has several subpages. Unfortunately, 85% of users visit only one department—without so much as a glance at the other departments and without buying anything in the department they actually visit.
Even the most inexperienced store owner would admit that this store has a serious problem.
Similarly, a high bounce rate should set off alarm bells for any website owner. Your website shouldn’t be a digital revolving door where customers pop in briefly only to disappear again right away.
Finally, your bounce rate can have an indirect impact on your website’s rankings in Google’s search results. A low bounce rate tells Google that your visitors are largely finding what they’re looking for.
A high bounce rate tells Google exactly the opposite—and that can ultimately affect your chances of being found in
What is a good rejection rate?
>It would be unrealistic to think that you can get all your visitors to convert—there will always be a certain percentage who “bounce.” Nor can a store owner expect all of his visitors to take action in the store—there will always be some who are “just browsing.”
But what, then, is a good rejection rate?
- 0–25%: Suspiciously low—there may be errors on the page or in your tracking
- 26–40%: An excellent bounce rate
- 41–55%: Average bounce rate
- 56–70%: High—and therefore poor—bounce rate
- 71–100%: Suspiciously high—there may be errors on the page or in your tracking
So you should aim for a bounce rate between 26 and 40%.
How to Lower Your Bounce Rate
Now you know what a bounce rate is and what constitutes a good bounce rate. So here’s perhaps the most important question: How do you lower your bounce rate?
1) Keep your promises
First and foremost, it’s important that your website meets users’ expectations when they click on it in the search results.
For the sake of example, let’s start with a collection page featuring yellow raincoats on the fictional online store regnfrakkeshoppen.dk. Being savvy, the online store owner has written catchy and eye-catching meta titles and meta descriptions to increase the click-through rate and draw customers to the page.
That's why the link to the page in Google's search results looks like this: ↓
Users who click on the link will expect to find a large selection of yellow raincoats on the page.
Of course, the site must then live up to those expectations. If users land on the site and find only four models, or only black raincoats, they will most likely click away—simply because they don’t find what they were promised.
So, to make a long story short: Keep your promises.
2) Create calls to action on your website
Call-to-actions are elements on your website that clearly and directly tell your visitors what to do. Typical examples include:
- An “Add to Cart” button below a product on an online store
- A “Read More” button with a link to a relevant subpage
- Links to the contact form, phone number, or email address
In other words, a call to action is a clear guide that makes it easy for your visitors to understand what you want them to do. So be sure to highlight the most important calls to action on your site—preferably above the fold.
“Above the fold” is a term from good old-fashioned analog journalism—the kind that leaves ink on your fingers. In the past, newspapers were often folded and displayed on a stand, and to catch the attention of passersby, the headline of the front-page article was placed “above the fold.”
The principle is exactly the same for a website or an online store. Here, too, you should place the most important content and your calls to action “above the fold.” Or to put it another way: Your users should be presented with specific options for taking action without having to scroll down the page.
3) Create internal links to improve the user experience
Internal link building involves creating links to other relevant pages on your website. For example, an online store owner who sells raincoats might want to create links to an internal blog post about maintaining waterproof materials or to a collection page featuring products for washing and caring for rainwear.
Regardless of your industry, however, there’s a good reason to review your internal linking structure if you want to lower your bounce rate. That’s because relevant internal links direct your visitors to new pages that can keep them engaged.
A good internal linking structure also helps improve your SEO —and thus your website’s ranking on Google. So you can kill two birds with one stone by strengthening your internal linking profile.
4) Create relevant and (visually) engaging content
Good content is one of the most important tools in your SEO strategy. But it’s also one of the most important tools for lowering your bounce rate.
Therefore, you should never underestimate the importance of engaging and relevant content that provides value to the users of your website. If you sell raincoats, for example, you can give your customers helpful advice on choosing a raincoat. This is the discipline known as content marketing: marketing that provides value to the recipient. You can read much more about this in my post“Why Your Business Should Write Blog Posts.”
However, your content shouldn’t just be relevant, engaging, and valuable—it also needs to be easy to understand at a glance. That’s why it’s important that your visitors don’t encounter an overwhelming wall of densely packed text when they visit your landing pages. This will cause most people—except for hardcore academics—to lose interest in a flash.
If you’d like some specific tips on writing effective landing page copy that engages and captivates your readers, I highly recommend reading my colleague Mie’s SEO checklist.
5) Avoid 404 errors
You’ve probably tried clicking on a search result and ended up on a so-called 404 page—a page that no longer exists. And you’ve probably also gotten so annoyed that you immediately clicked away from the page.
That’s exactly why you need to avoid those dreaded and despised 404 errors if you want to lower your bounce rate.
For the sake of example, let’s return once again to the online store that sells raincoats. The owner wants to gather all her raincoats on a single collection page, where she has previously categorized them by brand, color, etc.
Therefore, she creates a single collection page featuring all raincoats and deletes the pages for the previous subcategories—including the aforementioned collection of yellow raincoats. Unfortunately, this also means that users will be directed to a 404 page if they click on the search result for yellow raincoats.
So how do you prevent 404 errors?
You do this by setting up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a redirect from a dead page to an existing one. It’s a bit like when you move and report the change of address to the population registry. When you set up redirects, you’re letting your web server—and, most importantly, Google—know that your content has been moved to another page.
If you have a WordPress website and have Yoast SEO installed, you can quickly and easily monitor 404 errors and set up 301 redirects in the Redirect Manager. Click the “Redirects” tab, type or copy the URL of the broken page into the “Source URL” field, and paste the URL of the page you want to redirect to into the “Target URL” field.
Then click “Add redirect”—and presto: Now your web server knows that part of your website has been moved to a different address. This prevents your users from landing on a 404 page. And as an added bonus, you’ll boost your SEO because you won’t lose the value of the “link juice” that the URL has generated.
Is a high bounce rate always bad?
No, a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing. It can also mean that your visitors are finding what they’re looking for on their first try. If your visitors are specifically searching for yellow raincoats and land on the collection page featuring yellow raincoats without clicking through to another page, it could also mean that they found exactly what they were looking for right away.
Conversely, a high bounce rate is not a measure of success if your home page or specific landing pages serve as a gateway to the rest of your website. In this case, your online success depends on your users visiting more than one page.
For example, if you engage users early in the customer journey, it’s absolutely essential that they visit multiple pages on your website; otherwise, you can be sure that your website won’t be the one to help them continue on their journey. Or, to put it another way: They won’t end up buying from you.
Would you like more tools to lower your bounce rate?
I hope this post has given you a basic understanding of bounce rate. However, we’ve only just scratched the surface—the toolbox contains many more tools.
Would you like expert help applying these strategies in practice? Or are you simply too busy to deal with technical SEO challenges? Then contact Amplify at 70 60 50 28 or info@webamp.dk, and let’s talk about how our SEO specialists can lower your bounce rate.
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