Everything you need to know about bounce rate
If you use Google Analytics to get an overview of traffic, conversions and other activities on your website or webshop, you may have come across the "bounce rate " tab.
But what exactly is bounce rate? Why is it important to deal with? And how do you lower the bounce rate on your website or webshop? You can read more about that in this post.
Find out why server site tracking is not just a nice-to-have - but a need-to-have.
What is the bounce rate?
Bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors only visit one subpage on your website and otherwise take no action 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%, this means that 52.68% of your visitors leave your website without visiting any subpages other than the one they clicked on in the search result.
Avoid digital revolving doors - why your bounce rate matters
Bounce rate is a measure of how effective and user-friendly your website is.
A low bounce rate indicates that your users have an easy time navigating your website. A high bounce rate, on the other hand, can indicate that your subpages are not good enough to capture people's interest - and that can be a critical signal that your website:
- Not living up to their expectations
- Have issues with content, usability or design
For the sake of example, let's compare a website to a physical store. The store has multiple departments - much like your website has multiple subpages. Unfortunately, 85% of users only visit one department - without giving the other departments a second glance and without buying anything in the department they actually visit.
Even the most inexperienced merchant will recognize 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 and then disappear again.
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 finding what they are looking for.
A high bounce rate tells Google the exact opposite - and it can ultimately affect your chances of being found in
What is a good bounce rate?
>It would be utopian to think that you can get all your visitors to convert - there will always be a certain percentage that bounce. A store owner can't expect all his visitors to take an action in the store either - there will always be some who "just look".
But what is a good bounce rate?
- 0-25%: Suspiciously low - there may be errors on the page or in your tracking
- 26-40%: Excellent bounce rate
- 41-55%: Average bounce rate
- 56-70 %: High and thus 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 bounce rate is and what a good bounce rate is. So now comes 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 lives up to what users expect when they click on the page in search results.
For the sake of this example, let's take a collection page with yellow raincoats on the fictional webshop regnfrakkeshoppen.dk. Smart as she is, the webshop owner has written catchy and eye-catching meta titles and meta descriptions to increase click-through rates and attract customers to the site.
Therefore, the link to the page in Google search results looks like this: ↓
Users who click on the link will expect to find a large selection of yellow raincoats on the site.
Of course, the site has to fulfill those expectations. If users land on the site and only find 4 models, or only find black raincoats, they will most likely click away again - simply because they don't find what they were promised.
So to make a long story short: keep your promises.
2) Make calls to actions on your website
Calls to actions are elements on your website that clearly and directly tell your visitors what to do. Typical examples can be:
- A "add to cart" button under a product on an online store
- A "read more" button with a link to a relevant subpage
- Links to contact form, phone number or email
In other words, a call to action is a concrete guide that makes it easy for your visitors to decode what you want them to do. Therefore, make sure to highlight the most important calls to actions on your site - and preferably above the fold.
Above the fold is a term from good old-fashioned analog journalism - the kind that gives you ink on your fingers. In the past, newspapers were often folded together on a stand, and to attract the attention of passers-by, the headline of the front page article was placed "above the fold".
The principle is exactly the same with a website or webshop. Here, you should also place the most important content and your call to actions "above the fold". In other words, your users should be presented with concrete options for action without having to scroll down the page.
3) Create internal links for a better user experience
Internal link building is the work of creating links to other relevant subpages on your website. For the webshop owner selling raincoats, for example, it might make sense to link to an internal blog post about maintaining waterproof materials or to a collection page with products for washing and caring for rainwear.
Regardless of your industry, there is good reason to review your internal link structure if you want to reduce your bounce rate. Because with relevant internal links, you send your visitors to new pages that can keep their interest.
A good internal link structure also helps to improve your SEO - and thus your website's ranking on Google. So you can kill two birds with one stone by strengthening your internal link 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, never underestimate the importance of engaging and relevant content with value for your website users. For example, if you sell raincoats, you can give your customers advice on how to choose a raincoat. This is the discipline known as content marketing: marketing with value for the recipient. You can read more about this in my post "Why your business should write blog posts".
However, your content should not only be relevant, engaging and valuable - it should also be easy to decode visually. That's why it's important that your visitors don't encounter an overwhelming wall of dense text when they visit your landing pages. This will cause most people other than hardcore academics to lose interest quickly.
If you want concrete tips on how to write good landing page copy that retains and captivates your readers, I highly recommend you read my colleague Mies' SEO checklist.
5) Avoid 404 errors
You've probably clicked on a search result and landed on a so-called 404 page - a page that no longer exists. And you've probably also been so annoyed that you immediately click away from the page again.
That's why you need to avoid the dreaded and despised 404 errors if you want to reduce your bounce rate.
For the sake of this example, let's go back to the webshop that sells raincoats. The owner wants to gather all her raincoats on one collection page, where she previously categorized them by brand, color, etc.
Therefore, she creates one collection page with all raincoats and deletes the pages with the previous subcategories - including the aforementioned collection with yellow raincoats. Unfortunately, this also means that users end up on a 404 page if they click on the yellow raincoat search result.
So how do you prevent 404 errors?
You do this by creating 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a redirection from a dead page to an existing one. A bit like if you move house and report the move to the registry office. When you create redirects, you tell your web server and Google 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 create 301 redirects in the Redirect manager. Click the "redirects" tab, enter or copy the URL from the dead page in the "Source URL" field and paste the URL of the page to redirect to in the "Target URL" field.
Then click "Add redirect" and voila: your web server now 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 strengthen your SEO because you don'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 is not always a bad thing. It can also be a sign that your visitors are finding what they're looking for on the first try. If your visitors search specifically for yellow raincoats and land on the yellow raincoat collection page without clicking through to another page, it could also mean that they found what they were looking for straight away.
A high bounce rate, on the other hand, is not a success criterion if your entrance page or certain landing pages act as a gateway to the rest of your website. Here, your online success depends on your users visiting more than one page.
For example, if you capture users early in the customer journey, it's crucial that your users visit multiple subpages on your website, otherwise you can be sure that it won't be your website that helps them on their journey. In other words: They won't shop with you.
Want 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.
Do you want specialized help to put them into practice? Or are you just too busy to fiddle with SEO technical challenges? Then contact Amplify on +45 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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