How To Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

There are many factors which can be analyzed and used to define the success of a website, but one of the most underused of these is the site’s Bounce Rate. This, along with the time visitors have spent on the website are among the strongest indicators of whether the site’s visitors value the content, and in the long run are arguably more important to the success of the site than the money the site earns, at least in the early stages.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who leave the site after visiting it, without clicking on to any other pages, often because they’re not satisfied with the content which they’ve found on the site. A website’s bounce rate can be tracked through analytical tools such as the popular Google Analytics.
Other than giving a good indication of visitor satisfaction, a site’s bounce rate has also been confirmed by Google to be considered as a factor in a website’s search engine rankings. The bounce rate is something which is often ignored by webmasters, and many websites’ bounce rates sit constantly above 90%, meaning only 10% of visitors have any interest in the site’s content. However, there are steps which can be taken to improve this statistic.
The easiest – but most important – step to reduce the bounce rate is to give visitors somewhere else on your site to visit. It might sound obvious that if they don’t have the option to visit another page then they will have no option but to leave the site, however many websites’ interlinking is extremely poor. By making sure that every page of your content contains links to other relevant content should instantly improve the site’s bounce rate. This may be a mammoth task if your website is established and has many pages of content, but will be worth the effort. Sites using content management systems such as WordPress can usually do this automatically using ‘related posts’ plugins.
Another tip to improve the website’s bounce rate is to ensure that any external links open in new windows. This means that whenever someone clicks a link to go to an external web page from your site they will still have your page open in the background, and may still be interested in looking at other pages on your site.
Having high quality content is essential to ensure your bounce rate remains low; if someone reads a helpful and informative article then they will often want to look at what else is available from that website. It is also worth remembering that websites which are poorly designed, and in particular those with prominent adverts, will put off visitors and will often result in high bounce rates.