What is a bounce rate and how can I improve mine?

When you’re working with a Digital Marketing Agency you will often hear them talk about your bounce rate. It’s a very important part of analysing your website, but what is it, why is it so relevant and how can it be improved?

Let me explain…

The king of algorithms, Google say that a bounce rate is ‘the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.’

Example: In layman’s terms, if a visitors comes to your website, views only one page this will register as a 100% bounce rate, whereas if they visit two pages it’ll be 50% and so on. The lower the percentage, the more pages are being viewed per session.

The reason this is so important is that it is a measurable into how engaged a visitor is on your website. The lower the bounce rate, the better it is. It means the content they see is engaging them enough to want to continue their user journey through your website. This should in theory encourage more of your visitors to hit a CTA (Call to Action) and send you an enquiry.

One thing to remember though, if you have a single page website, your bounce rate will always be 100% so don’t panic too much! 

It’s all about your user journey.

Understanding how your visitors are using your website should be a fundamental part of your business online. If you don’t understand how they interact with it, you will never be able to find way of improving your lead generation and enquiry rates. Some simple changes to your website can often make a huge difference to your bounce rates.

Spend some time, maybe once or twice a month looking over your Google Analytics. If you don’t understand what you’re looking at, feel free to get in touch with our Search Engine Marketing team who will be more than happy to give you an overview into your website statistics.

What causes a high bounce rate?

There are lots of factors that can contribute into increasing your bounce rate. As an Agency we find that most of our new customers come to us because they are struggling to get a steady rate of enquiries through their websites. The bounce rate is the first thing we look at.

A few of the main causes of a high bounce rate include:

• Slow site loading speed
• Large, unoptimised imagery
• Hard to navigate pages
• Difficult to read content
• Irrelevant content

How can I improve/lower my bounce rate?

So we’ve explored a few of the main causes of a high bounce rate. To improve your bounce rate you, or your SEO Agency can make changes to your website to bring your bounce rate down.

Things to look at to improve your bounce rate include:

• Content relevance – The more relevant the content, the more likely visitors will click through.
• Easy to read content – The easier the better.
• Easy navigation – Hard to use websites with no real user experience or journey is bad.
• Call to actions – With a easy journey with clear call to actions the better.
• Structure of your website and content – Simple is always a good approach.

Quite simply, the better written content you have, with clear direction through your website, generally speaking will improve your bounce rate. Your SEO company should take time with you to understand your website analytics. The data that it will give you is invaluable if you want to improve your lead generation through your website.

If you’re looking at ways to improve your website, get in touch with our team today on 01329 565001 or contact us.