What is a Bounce Rate and How Does it Affect Your Website?

What is a Bounce Rate?

According to Google Analytics:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of quality visits and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” 

Imagine a ball hitting your website (demonstrating a visitor entering your site). If the user decides to visit another page the ball is absorbed, but if the user leaves your website after visiting one page, the ball bounces. 

A ‘bounce’ is essentially when a user enters and exits your website via only one page. 

The good, the bad, the ugly...

Bounce rates vary widely from industry to industry and web page to web page, but typical bounce rates are as follows:

• An 'exceptional' bounce rate is in the 26-40% range
• A 'good' bounce rate is in the 41-55% range
• An 'okay' bounce rate is in the 56-70% range
• Anything over 70% needs attention

Factors that Affect Bounce Rate & Our Solutions…

We have outlined some of the key factors that affect bounce rate and the solutions to ensure your visitors are absorbed!  

Slow Loading Time

A good web page load time is two seconds. If you find your website loads in 2.9 seconds, however, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web! 

For websites that are image heavy, complex and hosted on slow responding servers - you will experience a slower load speed. This contributes to a high overall bounce rate, affecting the potential to convert your visitors into customers.  

Our solution…

Based on Google’s recommendations, we analyse and improve the speed of your website through activities such as browser caching, image optimisation and more…  

With a website that loads faster, your users are more likely to navigate deeper. 

Poor, navigational structure

Has your website’s navigational structure got a clear purpose? Does it lead users directly to the information and pages they need? 

Websites that lack an easy to follow navigation could be at risk of a high bounce rate. A site with a cluttered visual design causes bad UX (User Experience) for your visitors - one of the main causes of high bounce rates. 

Our solution…

We design websites with navigational structures focussed around providing the best UX for your visitors. This ensures that users can easily access and find the content that they are looking for, with a focus on driving visitors to fill in the contact form or complete a purchase.

Irrelevant Content

As users, we want to be directed to what we have been promised we will find, without having to spend a lot of time searching for it. If your landing pages do not match what your keywords and ad copy has guaranteed, it is likely that your users will leave for a competitor website that has the relevant content they were looking for. 

Our Solution…

We provide content and SEO support (encompassing keyword research) to ensure that users are directed to quality content based on the key terms they searched. This contributes to a higher level of Organic traffic, thus helping to reduce overall bounce rate.

“Page Not Found”

If a user is presented with an error when they enter a website, e.g. a 404 error caused by an incorrect URL -  constraining them from accessing the page they requested. This more than likely results in them leaving the website, creating a bounce.

Our Solution…

As part of the SEO support we offer, we run weekly crawls on your website to ensure that it is not returning any errors like this. If it does, we ensure they are fixed straight away to prevent bounces.

How We Can Help…

We work with businesses of all sizes to provide supporting marketing activitiesto help reduce bounce rates.

Do you have any other questions about your bounce rate? Would you like some advice on how to help drive traffic & increase your conversions with other SEO activities? Get in touch today!