Your website’s search engine ranking can make or break your business. Search engine users don’t want to have to sort through pages and pages of results to get the information they want. They want answers fast, and if they don’t find what they’re looking for within seconds, they’ll leave, increasing your bounce rate.
What exactly is the bounce rate?
According to Google Analytics support, “Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.” Google Analytics records user engagement with your website, and every click counts. Google penalizes websites that have high rates of people leaving by ranking them lower on the list of results, and that means fewer leads and even fewer conversions for your business.
Tools of the trade
You can use several different tools to determine your website’s bounce rate such as Google Analytics, Clicky, and Woopra. Google Analytics is by far the most popular, so using it to determine each of your landing pages’ bounce rate is a good strategy.
Using your Analytics data, you can determine which pages in your site have the highest and lowest bounce rates. Lower rates are usually better, but consider the purpose of the page. A landing page with a phone number and a contact form doesn’t need a low bounce rate if it produces conversions.
How to reduce your website’s bounce rate
If you want optimal Google placement for your pages, you must provide visitors with something they can actually use. Provide them with quality content. That means your website should be readable and answer your readers’ questions. Avoid trying to cater your website to search engines’ complex algorithms, and think of your readers.
Do not participate in link schemes, build doorway pages (web pages that don’t have the information the user is searching for), or try any tricks that can temporarily boost traffic but ultimately deceive the reader. Google scans for evidence of those practices and severely penalizes those websites.
Quality content is key
In a perfect world, every user who lands on your website would read every page and buy what you’re selling. Of course, that’s not the case. You can limit single-page views by creating links to valuable content throughout your site.
You may think, “I’m not a writer. How can I generate the type of web content potential leads for my business will want?” Even if you are a person who is simply here to ask, «what is the bounce rate?», Lowpost is here to help. We make the dream of content automation a reality, meaning that you can develop your content marketing without overextending yourself.
