How to Reduce Bounce Rate for your Website

What is Bounce Rate?

When you’re working hard to increase your site’s search performance, one of the things that you should do is to reduce a high bounce rate. In other words, a high bounce rate is a symptom that something is wrong in your strategy – you’re not attracting the right site visitor or the visitors coming don’t have a good user experience.

Why It’s Important to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Reducing the bounce rate on pages that have the highest volume of traffic from your highest converting sources means more engaged visitors and a greater chance of conversion.

What follows is a list of 20 considerations for reducing your bounce rate. These are by no means absolutes and are relative to everyone’s unique value propositions and audience, but generally speaking, these are worth thinking about.

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate

Set Realistic Expectations: Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates

Content Websites: 40-60%
Lead Generation: 30-50%
Blogs: 70-98%
Retail Sites: 20-40%
Service Sites: 10-30%
Landing Pages: 70-90%

Attract the Right Visitors

Choose the right keywords to match your content -- not just to attract the most number of visitors.
Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
Write attractive, useful meta descriptions for search engine users.
Improve targeting of online advertising campaigns.

Enhance Usability

Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bulleted lists, whitespace, good color contrast, and large headlines.
Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers .

Speed Up Page Load Time

Use little or no self-loading multimedia content.
Set external links to open in new browser windows/tabs.
Don’t let ads distract from your content: Place static ads to sides, and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.