How to Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate

If you, as an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, are reading this blog post then you probably already realize the importance of having a web presence for your company. While all kinds of social media are great, you can’t beat a basic website to make yourself and your company visible on the Internet. Even if you don’t do your own website work, it’s important to understand how people will potentially interact with the site. Once you have a website, you need people to use it. The best way to figure out if people are using it in your intended manner is to follow analytics. Google offers great analytics tools that are fairly easy to learn and use. That’s for another post though. What I want to talk about today is decreasing your website’s bounce rate. Don’t know what a bounce rate is? That’s fine, but if you’re interested in making your website successful, you should probably be familiar with the term. Bounce rate is defined by Google as the percentage of single-page sessions, i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page. There are several reasons why people aren’t interacting with your website. Hubspot has put together a great infographic on how to decrease your website’s bounce rate. The infographic makes several good points, a couple of which we’ll focus on here:

• Attract the right visitors – Make sure the keywords you’re choosing match your content and what you’re trying to promote on the site. You want to reach your target audience, seeing as they’re most likely to engage with you. Engagement can mean anything from finding your phone number or address or making a purchase. You can also help attract the right visitors by creating multiple landing pages with unique content for various types of users. As an entrepreneur you know your audience who you want as visitors. Whether you do it yourself or have a web person, figure out how to get them to your site.
• Enhance usability – Making your website easy to use will immediately make visitors interact more and stay longer. There are several things that can make your website more usable. Having a good color contrast, using larger fonts, using large headlines, using bulleted lists, managing white space, and organizing sensibly all make a website more inviting for users. Using a good, mobile-responsive layout with easy-to-find navigation and search and content organized well in sections also help.
• Provide good content – Obviously the best way to keep people on your site is to make it interesting, provide good content! If the user wants to read what you have to say then they’re going to interact more and longer with your site. Give your content an obvious main message. Make it eye-catching with stylish copy and images. Make sure to edit for errors before posting anything. If you’re selling something or want the user to take a specific action, give a clear call to it and obvious links to next steps.

Hopefully some of these tips can help you or your web person decrease the bounce rate on your website. As an entrepreneur, you want users to interact with your website as much as possible and these tips are designed to help you help them do just that. The more they interact the higher the likelihood is that they’ll take something away from the interaction. In most cases, that take-way would be a sale or a prospect of a sale. That’s good for everyone! Full infographic: Bounce Rate (Infographic)