When looking to decrease your bounce rate, it is important to look at the optimisation of your site as well as the content that is being written as this can all lead to people clicking off of your webpage. Whether you are optimising for SEO or you decide to opt for PPC, there are a number of ways that you can begin to optimise the site and maintain a healthy session time. In this article, we will be looking into how reducing the bounce rate on your site could be harming your website’s rankings.
Optimise Website Design
When looking to improve your bounce rate, it is important, to begin with, the website. If your website is outdated and does not operate properly, this could be one of the causes of the bounce rate. By redesigning the website, you are then able to fully customise it to ensure that it is fit for purpose. Whether this is changing the colour theme to a range of colours that are much more inviting or redesigning the homepage to be more visual rather than pages of text, this can all help to reduce the bounce rate and increase session time when visiting your website.
Decrease Loading Time
Another way to reduce the bounce rate is to ensure that your website takes less than 5 seconds to load. A recent study has shown that 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load with just a one-second delay potentially resulting in a 7% reduction in the number of conversions that your business could gain. Due to this significant reduction in potential conversions, it is important to prioritise site speed and ensure that it is as quick as possible as this could affect inbound marketing strategies.
Improve Content Readability
When creating new content, we tend to prioritize the readability of the content, but what about the content that is already on the site? Whether this is a few changes over the course of the year, or a dedicated content team working on refreshing the content on your site, this can all help to reduce the bounce rate whilst providing potential customers with the information that they need when visiting your web page. This is crucial as this will help to increase session time as well as boost the E.A.T score for your website.
Avoid Pop-ups
Though it may seem tempting to use a number of pop-ups to keep people on your site, this could actually be harming your website with an increase in the bounce rate. If there are a number of pop-ups that are preventing people to read content, this can lead to people clicking off of your website and finding information elsewhere. In order to combat this, it is important to keep pop-ups to a minimum for important information such as offers and cookie policies as this will help to provide the audience with additional information rather than being a hindrance.
Keep Meta Descriptions Interesting
When creating numerous meta descriptions it can be difficult to think of new and creative ideas to increase the clickthrough rate and entice the reader. However, it is vital that you keep both the meta description and the content as interesting as possible in order to encourage your target audience to read your content and engage with you. By keeping the meta description interesting, you are then capturing the attention of your target audience from within the Google search results and encouraging them to click.
