What is a high bounce rate?

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to a particular website that leave without taking any action, such as clicking a link, requesting a quote or filling out a contact form, or actually making a purchase (if it’s an ecommerce website). A high Bounce Rate basically refers to those visitors that leave after viewing just one page.

Monitoring and improving your bounce rate is important because:

• If a visitor bounces from your website, you obviously didn’t convert them into a customer.
• It is believed by SEO experts that bounce rate may be used as a Google ranking factor.

Therefore, if you have a high Bounce Rate it means that you have a high number of visitors leaving your website before you have had the chance to convert them into paying customers, and Google will likely rank you lower in its search results, below those websites enjoying a lower Bounce Rate. Most importantly, a high Bounce Rate indicates to the business website owner that their site (or specific pages on their site) has issues with content, user experience, design or functionality. In a nutshell, a rising Bounce Rate is a sign that your homepage is off-putting in some way.

So, we’ve established that a high bounce rate is not a good thing, but how high is high?

What is considered a high bounce rate?

According to a report on go gorocketfuel.com the average bounce rate falls between 41%-55%.
56%-70% is higher than average but may not necessarily be alarming depending on the website. Therefore, any page (outside of blog posts, news, events, etc) that boasts a bounce rate of over 70% is considered a high and would benefit from a little investigation and improvement. If your pages are reporting a bounce rate within the 26 to 40 range, you can relax – that’s a pretty sweet bounce spot to be sitting in. However, try not to get caught up on the exact figures too much as what is considered “normal” for one industry may be different for another and it also depends on where your website traffic is travelling from.

N.B. Bounce Rate and Exit Rate are similar, but they do have a big differentiator:

Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors that land on a webpage and then leave without travelling (or bouncing) anywhere else on that website.

Exit Rate refers to the percentage of people that leave a specific page on a website having initially landed on another page on the website.

How can you improve your Bounce Rate and increase conversions?

This is where a digital marketing agency like Make Me Local can help! There are many factors that might be impacting why website visitors click onto your site and then leave pretty much instantly including:

• Slow loading speed – if it takes longer than a couple of seconds to load, the chances are a visitor will move onto the next result on the search results page.
• Design a better user experience via a well-structured website – if a user can’t work out where the information they need is on your site, they’ll leave sharpish.
• Ensure your website is responsive – with so much technology out there, its important to ensure your website can be accessible from a range of devices and screen sizes.
• Build some landing pages – it’s important to know where the entry points to your site are. It doesn’t matter how perfect your homepage is if most of your traffic comes form a blog article that wasn’t optimised for engagement. Landing pages are a great solution as they are designed to serve as the optimal entry point.
• Use engaging visuals and interactive content to help keep visitors engaged with your site longer.
• Plan your content marketing strategy – adding informative and useful content is a great way of keeping people on your site. Useful blogs, rich and engaging materials and relevant data and statistics will always earn a more meaningful longer-lasting experience with your brand. However, the pieces themselves will only be enough when they connect subjects (have internal links), boast a good SEO effort, and earn links from other websites.

When we design, or redesign a website, getting the bounce rate down is always considered. If you need help with this or any other element of SEO, give us a call and we’ll happily chat through options.