What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate tells you how many visitors view only one page on your website and take no other action, such as filling in a contact form, clicking a link, signing up to a newsletter or making a purchase.
If you have a bounce rate of 52.68%, for example, it means that 52.68% of your visitors leave your website without visiting any pages other than the one they clicked on in the search results.
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 find it easy to navigate your website. A high bounce rate, on the other hand, can indicate that your pages aren't good enough at capturing people's interest, and that can be a critical sign that your website:
- Doesn't live up to their expectations
- Has problems with content, usability or design
For the sake of example, let's compare a website with a physical shop. The shop has several departments, a bit like your website has several pages. Unfortunately, 85% of shoppers visit only one department, without giving the other departments so much as a glance and without buying anything in the department they actually visit.
Even the most inexperienced shopkeeper would recognise that this shop has a serious problem.
In the same way, a high bounce rate should set alarm bells ringing for any website owner. Your website shouldn't be a digital revolving door, where customers pop in quickly only to disappear again just as fast.
Finally, your bounce rate can have an indirect influence 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 the exact opposite, and that can ultimately affect your chances of being found in Google's search results.
What is a good bounce rate?
It would be utopian to think you can get all your visitors to convert; there will always be a certain percentage who “bounce”. A shopkeeper can't expect all his visitors to take action in the shop either; there will always be some who are “just looking”.
So 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 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 of 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 here 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 through to the page from the search results.
For the sake of 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, eye-catching meta titles and meta descriptions to increase the click-through rate and draw customers to the page.
So this is what the link to the page looks like in Google's search results: ↓
Users who click on the link will expect to find a wide range of yellow raincoats on the page.
Naturally, the page needs to meet those expectations. If users land on the page and find only 4 models, or only black raincoats, they'll most likely click away again, simply because they don't find what they were promised.
So, to cut a long story short: keep your promises.
2) Create calls to action on your website
Calls to action are elements on your website that clearly and directly tell your visitors what to do. Typical examples include:
- An “add to basket” button below a product in a webshop
- A “read more” button with a link to a relevant page
- Links to a 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 work out what you'd like them to do. So make sure you highlight the most important calls to action on your site, preferably above the fold.
Above the fold is a term from good old-fashioned analogue journalism, the kind that leaves printer's ink on your fingers. In the past, newspapers were often folded on a stand, and to make each paper catch 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 a webshop. 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 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 pages on your website. For the webshop owner who sells raincoats, for example, it might make sense to link to an internal blog post about caring for waterproof materials, or to a collection page with products for washing and caring for rainwear.
Whatever your industry, though, there's good reason to review your internal link structure if you want to bring your bounce rate down. With relevant internal links, you send your visitors on to new pages that can hold their interest.
A good internal link structure also helps improve your SEO, and with it 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 bringing down your bounce rate.
So never underestimate the importance of engaging, relevant content that adds value for the users of your website. If you sell raincoats, for example, you can give your customers advice on choosing a raincoat. That's the discipline known as content marketing: marketing that delivers value to the recipient. You can read much more about it in my post “Why your business should write blog posts”.
But your content shouldn't just be relevant, engaging and valuable; it also needs to be easy to take in visually. That's why it's important that your visitors aren't met by an overwhelming wall of dense text when they visit your landing pages. That will make most people other than hardcore academics lose interest in a flash.
If you want concrete tips on writing good landing page copy that holds and engages your readers, I highly recommend reading my colleague Mie's 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 clicked away from the page again.
That's exactly why you need to avoid the dreaded and despised 404 errors if you want to bring down your bounce rate.
For the sake of example, let's return once again to the webshop that sells raincoats. The owner wants to gather all her raincoats on a single collection page, whereas she previously categorised them by brand, colour and so on.
So she creates one collection page with all the raincoats and deletes the pages with the old subcategories, including the aforementioned collection of yellow raincoats. Unfortunately, that also means users end up on a 404 page if they click on the search result for yellow raincoats.
So how do you prevent 404 errors?
You do it by setting up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect sends visitors from a dead page to an existing one. A bit like when you move house and register your new address with the authorities. When you set up redirects, you're telling both your web server and, not least, Google that your content has moved to a different 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 dead 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 hey presto: your web server now knows that part of your website has moved to a different address. That way, you prevent 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” 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 be a sign that your visitors find what they're looking for at the first attempt. If your visitors search specifically for yellow raincoats and land on the collection page with yellow raincoats without clicking through to another page, it may also mean they found what they were looking for straight away.
On the other hand, a high bounce rate isn't a measure of success if your entry page or particular landing pages act as a gateway to the rest of your website. In that case, your online success depends on your users visiting more than one page.
If, for example, you reach users early in the customer journey, it's absolutely essential that they visit several pages on your website, because otherwise you can be sure it won't be your website that helps them along their journey. Or to put it another way: they won't buy from you.
Want more tools to lower your bounce rate?
I hope this post has given you a basic understanding of bounce rate. But we've only scratched the surface; there are plenty more tools in the toolbox.
Would you like specialist help putting them into practice? Or are you simply too busy to fiddle with technical SEO challenges? Then contact Amplify on 70 60 50 28 or info@webamp.dk, and let's have a chat about how our SEO specialists can lower your bounce rate.
