Orbit Informatics Blog
From my very personal point of view, bounce rate of website is the most common concern for the startup bloggers or online marketers. Since the beginning of my carrier, I didn’t know much regarding bounce rate for what, I messed up. That’s the main reason today I’ve showed up to introduce you with the most effective 7 ways to reduce bounce rate of & keep visitors in your website on daily basis.
As I mentioned first, keeping a steady visitors rate is quite a common concern these days from an entrepreneur’s perspective these days. I believe most of the experts will sing along with me regarding the fact that bounces are one of the few frustrating actuality of maximum web owners.
A study was made few days ago by famous Web Analytics Company, KissMectric, which indicates the standard bounce rate for any sort of website is 40.5%. However, it furthermore depends on the industry you’re making impact and you might experience the different something like, content based websites get 40-60%, retail based sites get 20-40% and service providing websites face 10-30%bounce rate. Bounce rates are actually built upon first time visitors.
Albeit bounce rates are somewhat dissatisfying, they forever exhibits some issues which can be sorted out to fix your website. There can be so many reasons to be worried about like design layout, navigation buttons, targeting efforts and so on. And you by doing some minimal changes, you can immediately make cut back your site’s bounce rate.
Well, I’ve talked enough in the introductory part. Pardon me, if I’ve bored you guys L. Let’s go through the real information’s below and make some solid intuition.
What are bounce rates actually?
Bounce rates are the percentages of visitor viewing your website page without going through any other pages. Don’t make it complicated with exit numbers, which only tells you the number of people leaving your site from a page, since they might have gone through some other pages first.
Do make sure, you’re not misinterpreting bounce rate with exit rates. It’s quite important to be concerned that a potential visitors could spend 5 to 10 minutes on a certain page before leaving the website.
In that scenario, your purpose is fully attained or the visitor might forget to close it….LOL!!
What do bounce rates tell you?
I firmly believe that you guys are used to the commonly utilized metrics. Bounce rate actually is the measurement of how sticky the site is.If the bounce rate is pretty high, the first reason might be irresponsible or irrelevant content. Your web contents are probably not doing their job accurately, although there can be plenty of other possibility too.
Ask any online bloggers, digital marketers and any internet specialists regarding bounce rate. They would always mention bounce rate as the metrics of comprehending success of a specific page.
For instance, you can consider Google Analytics. The following picture tells the full story concerning the percentage of audience visiting multiple web pages along with site’s capability of diverting visitor’s interest beyond the web page they appear to other. Besides, the following picture also tells other measures likewise the average time spent by visitors on a certain page, visitor’s location and visitor’s interest on reviewing the whole page from top to bottom.
Well, the proposition remains the same. If you wish to make your visitors hang around on your website for a while, the superior ways to reduce bounce rate shall be strictly followed.
Most importantly, whether the bounce rate is good or bad, fully depends on the category of website you’re running.
Is a high bounce rate always a bad thing?
Things are about to get quite controversial now.
In a word, NO, high bounce rate isn’t always such a bad thing. But of course, it very much relies on the intent of the site.
Don’t misunderstand the meaning of my statement.
If a visitor tends to find a contact number fast, he or she will leave quickly, if the site is facilitated with such effort to enable him or her to find that info easily, despite of increasing the bounce rates.
But, we’d love to keep visitors in our site as longer as we can. If an audience clicks on a certain page, and doesn’t read the article thoroughly, that means we’ve not done good enough or as expected.
So, other than some extraordinary case, high bounce rate is not a good thing.
The ultimate relationship between bounce rates and SEO
Since you’re making an attempt to relinquish in online business world, you must be equipped with all the terms of SEO or Search Engine Optimization similarly. Google of course doesn’t care about your bounce rate and self-willingly isn’t intended to find that. But they can theoretically find that info from the billions of websites that regularly use Google Analytics.
By the term, “Theoretically”, I meant ranking factor that works like an indication of how compatible your web landing page is, how much useful and unique this is, how much the page is related according to the type of website and many more.
I would say, think like Google and you’re portraying user’s action on a massive scale regularly. Since Google has to face billions of searches every day, it has to deal with uncountable numbers and make definite assumption regarding websites or users, which you might think as an impossible task.
Want to know how Google monitors? For instance, we all know knife and swords are of similar category. As a human, we know that, but for an automated system or robot, it has seen millions of web pages containing the key phrase, “knives” and thousands of pages with keyword “swords”. In the eyes of Google, knives and swords are similar. This way Google filters the websites based on keywords and industry as well.
In search engine factor, there are some additional things to keep in mind at the same time. Because, it fully varies on visitors purpose. The landing page loading time and long press click. If an audience is very busy and just entered into a web page to see today’s weather update, don’t expect him/her to stay there for a long time. Always measure how much time he or she spends before going back to the search result page.
In short, it works like:
If a visitor goes through a webpage through SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and spends some minuets there, it indicates that the search result was relevant to the purpose and Google has done good job as well as the website to be ranked on high position.
If the visitor immediately returns back to the search result page and clicks another link, it means the site is not that useful and irrelevant to the searcher.
Fundamentally, both of the working procedure is quite simple and many people know that. If people don’t spend time on a webpage of your website that appears in search result, Google will monitor it and immediately penalty you by assuming several reasons behind that action.
But I believe Google will soon come up with some new metrics to make the search result more effective and time saving as well.
7 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate
After some in detail information regarding Bounce rate, we’ll now look forward to reveal the most anticipating methods to reduce bounce rate. Let’s have a quick walk through over them and see if you’re already concerned about them or not.
1. Shorten the Page Loading Time
This is fortunately the most disturbing reasons of high bounce rate. Do you know what visitors do? People don’t like to wait more than 4 seconds on a loading page.
No one has ever said, “I love slow web pages”
Make sure your webpage doesn’t consume enough time to annoy the visitors.
What Makes Landing Page Slow?
There are some solid actions need to be taken if you are up to slow down your landing web pages.
Using the worst or cheapest hosting. You’d get what you pay for.
Adding oversized image that takes huge time to be downloaded.
Using too many images that annoy the visitors or distract them from actual purpose
Using too many customized fonts, which are not easily readable
Adding fancy JavaScript effects and too many sliders that takes plenty of loading time
What’s the Solution?
The forever golden method rule that make visitors leave web page, if you tend to make them wait for more than 4 seconds for a web page to be loaded fully. The ideal time is 2 seconds or less.
Measuring whether you’ve taken over 2 seconds or not is a crucial task to be fair. You can use the following 2 tools to apprehend how fast the normal visitor would see your landing page.
Just put your page URL at the address box and observe the result.
In case your landing page takes more than 2 seconds to load on, take a close look on the fonts, scripts or even the content to lower down page download time.
2. Develop Contents Readability
Lack of contents readability is another common reason that your targeted audience leave your website. User experience actually largely depends on your web contents legibility and credit ability. Certainly, the visitors scare of large chunk of words. They don’t love to dig deep through that.
I’m recently following the blogs of exerts like Neil Patel, who is putting too much efforts on contents scalability. Without solid readability, your greatly written contents will simply go in vain.
Visitors don’t even care of any sort of metrics or keyword factors. They love to learn something new and let them do that. Put your contents in easy to read format. You can check out my previous contents to know more regarding contents readability.
An Absolute Guide to Social Media Marketing Metrics
9 Checklists for Your Blog that You Shouldn’t Do
Just check out these contents and see what I’ve done to keep my readers knocking me.
Google’s Co-founder and Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik says….
Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life
How to Develop Contents Readability?
- Make the Headline big and bold
- Don’t forget about subheadings and bullet points to make the article look attractive
- Be generous on using subtitles/subheading to put more light on corresponding topics.
- Use bullet points fruitfully to explain something important to remember
- Add a lot of charts, screenshots, images, quotes from industry experts where needed.
- Sometimes bold the keywords, but don’t do it excessively.
- Invite the readers to participate or take action (Sharing in Social Media, Comment) by asking a lot of question about the topic of your content.
- Add the “Conclusion” part as a subheading at the end of your content and influence them to take action. Make that conclusion part intuitive.
You can also check the readability of your website at Read-able.
3. Never Disrupt the UX + Avoid Popups
Popups is an interesting and never-ending issue to debate among the owners and marketers. Whether it comes for one time or fully ignored, Popups are always disturbing. A study in 2013 shows that more than 68% web users found irrelevant popups to be disturbing.
Our blog has also a popup that appears one time for a single loading. Believe it or not, I’d love to remove that thing.
Popups always disrupt the visitors and distract them from reading a content. Suppose you’ve found something very interesting to read on like,
4 Confidential Tricks to Establish Brand Loyalty
How would you feel if a popup appears at the middle of your concentration? Disgusting, right? And sometimes marketers even use bullying or aggressive language in the popups that I always decide to leave after seeing that. I believe I’m not alone on that topic.
Well, if you find any of our post too much chunky or experience any other issue, please let us know through the following comment box or even tell us by keeping in touch with our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter pages.
On the other hand, popups are beneficial to grow email list and subscriber number faster.
If you wish to go on that way, it’s legitimate by the way. But with a profound ambition of getting plenty of organic visitors every day, you must think about getting rid of popups or keep it in a minimal number that isn’t disturbing or annoying at all.
People tend to respond through emails rather than taking action popups.
Some popups are designed to influence traffic and increase conversion rate instead of making them angry. Using those popups are forever welcomed.
Famous Content Strategist Scott Abel says based on the action for fulfilling customers demand,
Adapt to your customer’s needs. They expect it
4. Keep Your Website Fresh with Proper Contents
Always try to keep your blog fresh with the right form of content that goes with your blog category in order to make sure better ROI or Return of Investment. If you don’t know about ROI or Google Analytics, you can check,
Maximize ROI Using Web Analytics – 3 Super Quick Tips
According to HubSpot, a business website or blog, that published fresh articles on daily basis, has intention to produce 125% more leads or sales than the people who don’t. However, the contents have to be powerful, unique, and relevant and quality assured at the same time.
Powerful contents like Why Your Brand Advertising Should Go Digital?, can amaze the visitors with some excruciating information. But to solve their problem, audience need relevant or right articles like 5 Major Startups Business Mistakes Everybody Does, can show people right path that they can implement and produce result as well.
By continuously publishing quality and fresh content regularly, you’d grow a trustworthy relationship with your targeted audience. Always remember, readers are way smarter than us. So don’t act aggressive on manipulative or deceptive tactics. But they will be faithful to keep in mind concerning the words you use and step your take.
This strategy will end up conquering new visitors every day, since your returning visitors are going to spread the name of your blog unconsciously. Remember, attracting old visitors is an art. If you can do that, you’re on the way of making revenue for sure.
5. Fascinating Call to Action
Invite the visitors to take any action. Tell them to comment, influence them to like and derive them to share your post in social media.
According to Go-Globe,
“47% of websites have a clear call-to-action button that takes users 3 seconds or less to see.”
Think again. Are you doing to the same? Just think you’ve done everything right. You put the appealing title, publishing fresh content, maintaining quality, but failed to make the visitors interested to make some move with sluggish and effortless CTA. How unexpected that would be?
Based on a study by SmallBizTrends,
More than 70% small B2B websites are lacking from call to action, for what they repeatedly experience high bounce rate along with low conversion rate.
When it’s the matter of optimizing CTA, each of the single element counts. If it’s a small thing like altering the text on a button, or color of the social icons can always create massive difference. All in all, it can attract the potential users and divert them to a certain page to your site along with reducing bounce rate. You check the following links to grasp real time ideas about the benefit of effective CTA.
10 Call-to-Action Case Studies w/ Takeaways & Examples from Real Button Tests
That content shows that a Danish Ecommerce site has been able to increase conversion rate up to 18% just by adding few CTA words with a solid product pages link.
Improved usability requires great call to action and whenever you can do that, your visitors will love to visit your page and keep in touch. Each second they spend for the reason of increased CTA will ultimately enhance your websites conversion rate. Definitely it’s one of the most exclusive ways to reduce bounce rate of.
6. Entice the Right Audience
Christina Halvorson mentioned in her book Content Strategy for Web,
Better content means better business for you.
If your so called content strategy isn’t been able to attract the right audience or increase sales rate for you, it’s high time that you make some improvement. There is nothing more powerful than posting a customized content that’s perfect for your industry and for what, you ought to develop a brand new content strategy.
Based on HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report, maximum number of content marketers said,
Customized contents always put positive impact on visitor’s characteristics and reinforces relation with consumers.
The very common mistake of acquiring high bounce rate that plenty of content marketers make due to the lack of quality and original content. But be definitive to the term Quality&Unique.
What is Quality Content?
Well, according to the recent updates in digital marketing world, a content with more than 2000 words are identified as a high quality content, since they tend to offer a complete outline regarding any topic that the audience would like to go through.
It doesn’t matter actually which industry you belong, you should make sure of reaching out your targeted visitors.
7. Website Design + Responsiveness
Users will ultimately visit your webpage from social network or search engine result or whatever. Whenever they land on your page, the very first thing they would notice, is the website’s design.
Your tweets, search results, Facebook posts may influence him to click, but bad design won’t make them to stay there.
Better design means utmost professionalism. If you’re looking for a web developer to reconstruct or re-design your website, you should check the following link to make sure about hiring the best personnel.
Looking for a Web Developer? 9 Exquisite Skills to Consider Must
So, whether your website is about service or product or just blog, make it as much professional as possible.
Another thing you need to keep in your mind is the responsiveness. It’s one of the key factors to reduce bounce rate these days. Before Google valuing responsiveness, mobile bounce rate for any website was over 70%. But now it’s the major source of customers.
Did I miss anything? Please don’t hesitate to state your opinion through the following comment box. If you think this content is good enough, you must share it with the new comers. I’ve tried my best to help you guys to recognize the best ways to reduce bounce rate of and keep visitors on your site.
