Don't Let Your Visitors Bounce - Three Tips to Keep your Bounce Rate Low

As we had explained in a previous blog (click here to read it) about which web data metric is better, page views or unique views, we pointed out that while some websites prefer to have a lot of visitors, other websites care more about having returning visitors who enjoy the content of the website, even if in total there are fewer visitors. Besides looking at page views and unique views, another way to find out whether or not a website’s visitors enjoy the content of the website is by looking at the bounce rate.

For those not aware of the term, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your websites and leaves again without viewing any other pages on your website. So if your websites bounce rate is 80%, this means that 80% of the people visiting your website only looks at one page. This can potentially tell you a lot about your site. Many affiliate sites such as landing pages for example, are not meant to have the visitor go to more than one page on the website. Other ways a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing for your website is if the a lot of these visitors only viewing one page on the other hand click on advertisements or sign up for the product offered on the website.

Having said that, more often than not a high bounce rate is a bad sign for a website. The longer a visitor stays on a website and the more pages he visits, the bigger the chance there is for him to either sign up for something or purchase a product on the site. Having a high bounce rate shows that while you might be able to attract visitors to your website, you are not able to interest them enough once they are there to have them visit more than one page. The reasons for this can be many. The obvious reason would be that the content of the page is boring or unappealing. Another way to scare visitors away swiftly is to have a bad website design or too many advertisements.

More interesting than the reasons for a high bounce rate are the ways how decrease a high bounce rate.

Here is the 3 most effective ways to decrease your bounce rate:

• First -  The best thing to do first to make sure of is that visitors immediately know what your site is about when arriving at your homepage. People do not have the patience to spend time on figuring out what the website is about and will quickly move on to a different website if it is not clear.
• Second - Having professional design is a major factor in keeping your visitors longer on your website. The design should not only please the eyes of the visitor, but also gives them an indication on how serious or professional your website is. As a bonus, a good design can make the eyes of the viewer focus on specific areas of the site, making them explore your site more thoroughly.
• Third - A feature most people enjoy is multimedia. Images and videos makes the site more interesting, and keeps the visitor at the page longer, decreasing the bounce rate. Just make sure not to have too much multimedia on the page, as this can increase the loading time of a page, and if the page is too slow to load the visitor will leave immediately increasing your bounce rate. Not to mention search engines punishing your ranking as a they prefer websites with low loading time.

But the ultimate secret in keeping your bounce rate low and the main way  to keep your visitors at your website is by having good content. The most used cliche in internet marketing is “content is king”, and without the king, your website is likely to have a very high bounce rate regardless of whether or not you follow the other 3 steps.