If you’re a small business owner pondering whether visitors to your website stick around once they’ve found you – then you’ll be pleased to know there is a metric for this and it’s known as your bounce rate.

You website’s bounce rate is defined by Google Analytics as the percentage of single page sessions on your website. Put simply, in layman’s terms – this means the number of people who visit one of your web pages and then leave without clicking anywhere else.

Why it’s important to reduce your bounce rates

A high bounce rate can potentially spell trouble for a business. It means that either your visitor can’t find what they were looking for when they landed on your site page or they didn’t find it user-friendly.

The reason we get so hung up about bounce rates is that it means site visitors aren’t bothering to look for any further content on your site. If you want to attract (and let’s not forget actually convert) visitors to become loyal customers then you need them clicking through to other pages via calls-to-action or signing up to your database.

Say what you mean, mean what you say

Nothing frustrates a site visitor more than a poorly designed website that doesn’t deliver upon their expectations. Help reduce your bounce rate by making sure your content is what the visitor is anticipating and this means using headlines that match what your blog content is all about and call-to-actions in ads that are not misleading in any way, shape or form.

4 quick tips to lower your bounce rate

If your business needs to decrease its bounce rates, then tweaking a few elements on your website will do the trick. 

1. State a clear call-to-action on your landing page

One of the major causes of someone bouncing off your page is visitor confusion so it’s important that your purpose is clear.

2. Make sure your visitor can find their way around

This means having clear navigation – if your visitor can’t find what they’re looking for, it’s safe to say they’ll leave in search of another site

3. Help increase engagement and readability

More white space is a great way to help increase engagement and bold headlines and bulleted lists make everything more readable. Make sure your content is easy to read even on the small screen for all your mobile visitors.

4. Pay attention to load times

Be careful of third-party content and widgets as these could increase your load time which could cause frustration. Remember – faster load times are always going to be appealing to visitors!