Your online digital marketing strategy’s SEO initiatives will include reducing its bounce rate. What’s that? Why is it so important? And what can be done to improve this metric? Let’s examine your options. In layman’s terms, your bounce rate increases when a visitor arrives at your site, then exits without exploring additional pages. Sometimes this is a good thing (i.e. they were looking for something specific, landed on that page, located that intel, then left). But mostly it is assumed that they left for a competitor’s site, so generally this metric is one you really want to see experiencing a downward trend. Again in simple language, pinpointing and remediating the sources of high bounce rates will boost your site user engagement leading to improved rankings, and increased revenues.
Here’s a sampling of the critical metrics that solid SEO pros target when reducing bounce rates:
- Page Load Time: The longer a site page takes to load, the higher the bounce rate. While a desktop site version may experience a good website bounce rate, at Active Web Group, we pay particular attention to page loads from mobile devices and improved responsive design to ensure an optimal mobile user experience.
- Navigation and Site Search: These functions are crucial to reducing bounce rates. The goals here are to make it as easy and quick as possible for visitors to locate what they came for.
- Formatted, Fresh, and Varied Site Content: pages of relentless text are difficult to read. Use bullets, bold text, images, and video to pique visitors’ interest and keep them on your site longer. Do not forget the power of the Call to Action- it will serve as a navigation tool and guide visitors to the content they are searching for. Do not forget to update your content frequently!
- Site Etiquette/Link Strategy: This means vigilant site maintenance. Broken links are a big visitor turnoff that invites them to leave. However, internal links designed to assist visitors to navigate quickly to what they are looking for facilitates a positive experience and builds a good website bounce rate.(Just remember to ensure that these links open in a tab.)
- Build Trust: prominently display your site/brands affiliations such as the BBB, and with positive reviews. This encourages visitors not only to remain on your site, but to bookmark and return.
Bounce rates cannot be avoided, but by scrupulously tracking site metrics via Google Analytics and other tools, and with the right digital marketing pros utilizing the right SEO initiatives, a good bounce rate can be achieved and maintained.
Talk to Active Web Group’s team to learn more by scheduling a confidential consultation at (800)-978-3417.
