3 Tips for Lowering Your Website’s Bounce Rate

When it comes to the metrics of your website, one of the most elusive and mystifying can be your bounce rate. While your other metrics look like they’re doing good—decent time on page, adequate click through rate, etc.—a sky-high bounce rate can be disheartening, especially if you don’t understand why it’s happening. To help you figure out a good benchmark for your bounce rate and then learn to improve that metric, here are three tips for getting that bounce rate lower than it currently is.

Make Sure You’re Getting the Visitors You Want

One of the biggest reasons someone bounces from your website within a matter of seconds can be attributed to a bad match between their query and the content they saw on your page. This can at times be seen as clickbait—simply trying to attract as many visitors as possible with no regard to what they’ll actually find on your page. An approach such as this will keep your bounce rate metric high.

To combat this, Sam Kusinitz of HubSpot suggests looking at your pages with a high bounce rate and double checking to ensure the keywords that are bringing someone to those pages actually match up with what the visitors is likely expecting to find there. If the leap is a little too far and you’re not getting the visitors you want with the keywords you’re currently using, try rewriting the page with more specific keywords to see your bounce rate improve.

Fix Initial UX Problems

Another huge reason you could have a massive bounce rate rests in the user experience. This is different than the reason mentioned above because with UX, the content may be perfectly matched to the visitor’s query, but the way the content is shown makes it not worth the visitor’s time or effort to stay on the page.

According to Nick Eubanks, a contributor to Search Engine Watch, some of these bounce rate killers on the UX side include pop-ups, slow load times, bad overall design, not being mobile-friendly, distracting ad placement and more. If you look at your pages with high bounce rates and see that they are falling victim to any one of these UX faux pas, do all you can to get these problems taken care of quickly. Eliminating these UX problems will help to keep your bounce rate at a reasonable level.

Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

Because it can be hard to know what your target audience actually wants to see on your web pages, sites with the lowest bounce rates usually got there by trial and error. Experimenting with what works and what doesn’t with regards to your bounce rate will help get you on the right track for your pages.

SEO guru Neil Patel shares that when experimenting with web pages that have a bad bounce rate, your thinking should go in the process of the Conversion Architecture. This means you start the continuous cycle of analyzing, talking, planning, designing, testing, and marketing your landing pages until you find the best collaboration that has the smallest bounce rate. Only by your willingness to experiment and change your website will your find what truly works for both your brand and your audience.

You don’t have to settle with having a bounce rate higher than you’d like. There are steps you can take to shrink that bounce rate and see improvements in your other web page metrics as well. Try the tips mentioned above to find a bounce rate that works for both you and your visitors.