What is the Bounce Rate?

When you create or manage a website, chances are, you want your audience to engage with it, instead of just looking at it and then leaving. Engagement is key to online success. After all, what’s the point of you taking all that time to attract new visitors to your site if they don’t actually engage with any of your site’s content?

Here’s where the concept of bounce rate comes in.

Inspired by the US slang verb to bounce, meaning to leave an event or location quickly; bounce rate refers to the proportion of visitors that quickly leave a web page without looking at any other pages. 

Why Is Bounce Rate So Important?

Bounce rate is crucial for three key reasons: 

1. If a user "bounces" from your site without clicking through, it means that they haven’t converted into a subscriber or a sale. Improving your bounce rate is a sign that engagement with your site is improving which often also leads to improved conversion rates.
2. Bounce rate can sometimes be used as a Google ranking factor, and if yours is high, your website's chances of ranking high will be too low. Digital marketers must do everything they can to rank well on Google.
3. A high bounce rate can sometimes tell you that your site (or specific pages on your site) has issues with content, client experience, page format, or copywriting. In other words, it can act as indirect feedback from your audience! And if you're smart about it, you can use this to improve your content.

How To Improve Your Bounce Rate

Now that you’ve learned what bounce rate is, fret not! There are ways that it can be improved and managed - before we risk too much traffic loss from your website.

• Add Visual Detail From Start to End

Adding visual depth to content such as videos and illustrations can more than double the average time spent on a page. For example, embedding YouTube videos can lower bounce rates and encourage more visitors to engage with your material. 

Create meaningful content, and that speaks to visitors in more ways than one. Add different ways of communicating with them including images,  videos, and embedded social media posts.

• Add Bucket Brigades to Your Text

Bucket brigades are sentences often used for website content that grab a readers’ attention. They also function as natural text breakers preventing article or web posts from becoming dry or monotonous.

By sprinkling these throughout your text, you can keep visitors interested in your content and improve your bounce rate.

For example:

• Here’s the thing
• Check this out
• With that
• Why, you ask?
• Think about it.
  
  
  

• Create Content That’s Smooth to Read

If reading material is hard to read, nobody will stick around — which means a high bounce rate. Use strategies such as adding a lot of white space, using a bigger font, and sectioning text with subheadings to make your text easy for people to read.

• Satisfy Search Intent

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is to bring real value to your audience through your digital content. Valuable and reliable material will speak for itself and attract an equally loyal and interested audience. On the other hand, if your content is empty and vague, it’ll have the opposite effect.

Search intent is what Google users are looking for when they search a specific term. And if your page doesn’t satisfy this, they will just go back to the search results. So, it’s crucial to add information relevant to the subject and make sure you’re covering the key points.

Key Takeaway

Overall, you may increase your website traffic by keeping an eye on your bounce rate and finding ways to improve it. Give visitors a reason to stay on your site and see what you have to offer