Watching your Google Analytics and wondering how to keep more people engaged and on-site? In today’s blog post I want to talk you through bounce rates, what they are and how they affect your website’s appeal to the traffic you drive from social media, search engines and your email list.

A bounce rate is tracked and calculated in data form when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. An average is then calculated by Google (and other search engines) to determine how well received by visitors that page is. The higher the percentage of people who click away, rather than taking a second action, such as; buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link, then the poorer search engines view the option of sharing that page, or your website as a whole in their index.

Essentially bounce rates are another important ranking factor for Google. How quickly people leave your site without taking another action indicates poor content, possibly low page speed, or poor user experience (UX).

You can find your bounce rate in your Google Analytics under the ‘Behaviour’ tab.

For most of us business owners a high bounce rate is a bad thing, but there are occasions, as Google say where a higher rate might not be so bad:

Here are some examples of industry averages for bounce rate benchmarks (according to customedialabs):

• 20% – 45% for e-commerce and retail websites

• 25% – 55% for B2B websites

• 30% – 55% for lead generation websites

• 35% – 60% for non-ecommerce content websites

• 60% – 90% for landing pages

• 65% – 90% for dictionaries, portals, blogs and generally websites that revolve around news and events

Let us look at that in chart form so you can see where the differences are in the highest bounce rate acceptability are.

So it seems for most business owners we want to be aiming for anything under say, 50%.

There are 3 ways you can reduce your bounce rate quickly;

1. Improve your page content giving more value to your audience and a clear Call to Action (CTA) for a further site action - this could be revisiting key pages of information, providing better copy, or adding things like testimonials.

2. Reduce your page loading speed - you can find out how to do this here

3. Improve navigation - make it easier for people to take their own choice of action after reading your page

Back in May 2020, I wrote a blog post called ‘How do I improve my Google Ranking (2020 adventures)’. It was the start of my website revamp as I transitioned from a business owner who consulted and coached craft business owners in taking their product to market, which included a heavy element on marketing, to a business that served other business owners with marketing strategies on a freelance basis.

You can see back in May 2020 my weekly bounce rate was pretty high at around 75% and with limited page views. This was because I had mostly been working at this point in growing my social and email outreach, which is where the vast majority of my audience was buying from. In fact, that particular audience, the ones primed and ready to buy weren’t taking the time to visit my site regularly, if at all.

This showed in my website traffic rates.

The reason for this… quite simply, was that most of these clients followed me on socials from my own craft business days and had already bought into the idea that I could help them through the success they had seen me achieve.

By May 2020 I had transitioned (albeit it quietly) to my new business focus, a freelance content marketing manager and so my site overhaul needed work drastically to grow it’s own new audience, just as I would have to do on my social media and through my email list.

Bounce rate was one of the areas I worked hard on using the strategies above and you can see that in just a few months I made a dramatic difference to my weekly rate of bounce and my page views as a result.

I didn’t have a budget to put into this, I had to do all the work myself, but you can see it paid off. I would say my weekly bounce rate has now stabilised to an average of 0.5 to 2.5% on average. 

So, if you are thinking that you can’t make a difference to your own website’s Google ranking, or audience engagement, then I say simply, YOU ARE WRONG!

Go get ‘em!!

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