If you’re new to the world of SEO, you may have heard the term “bounce rate” and wonder what it means. Simply put, your website’s bounce rate is determined by what percentage of users leave your site after just one page view. They come, they stay on your website for one page, then they hit the back button.
If you’re running a business website where you want visitors to perform certain actions (whether that’s buying a product, reading your blog, filling out their contact info for more information, or anything else), a high bounce rate is a signal that something is very wrong! Our Omaha SEO experts at Big Red SEO are here to tell you the reasons visitors bounce and why lowering your bounce rate is important for your search engine optimization’s success.
Omaha SEO Question: Why Do People Bounce?
You may wonder why you’re seeing high bounce rates in your Google Analytics reports, and the truth is that it boils down to three simple reasons:
- Your visitor didn’t find what they were looking for.
- Your webpage was confusing and difficult to use.
- They found what they were looking for (your phone number, address, or content).
There’s not much you can do about #3, and you shouldn’t worry about bounces that come from people who found what they wanted quickly on your site. If they end up making the call that gets you the sale, that’s all that matters.
For #1 and 2, it stands to reason that to lower your bounce rate you have to work on two things—the design of your website, and your methods of communicating what your site’s about to visitors before they click through. With these two ideas in mind, our Omaha SEO team will lead you through some things we can do for you today to lower your bounce rate.
Why Should You Even Care About Bounce Rates?
Besides being a great indicator of communication problems that need fixing between you and your customers, a high bounce rate is also a red flag for Google and other search engines. A high bounce rate equals a low-quality website, and Google doesn’t rank what it sees as low-quality websites highly, if at all. If you want to avoid that stigma and see a rise in your Omaha SEO rankings, you need to pay attention to your bounce rate.
That being said, though, you’re never going to have a bounce rate of zero. In fact, your bounce rate is always going to be a pretty high number. Rather than psyching yourself out for having a bounce rate that you think is too high, it’s better to have an understanding of what your particular average bounce rate has been over time—that way you can start with an accurate baseline and document the upticks and downticks in your bounce rate, then make changes to your web design and content accordingly.
Here’s a list of average bounce rates for different kinds of websites, just to give you an idea of where most websites stand:
- Content Websites – 40-60%
- Blogs – 70-98%
- Retail Websites – 20-40%
- Landing Pages – 70-90%
Attracting the Right Kind of Visitor with Omaha SEO
Attracting the right kind of visitor to your website (the kind who doesn’t immediately say “Oops” and hit the back button) starts with a couple of search engine optimization techniques:
- In-Depth Keyword Research: You have to know what searchers are typing into Google while trying to find the services you offer. Our Omaha SEO company has an intensive discovery process for finding the ideal keywords you should be targeting based on your industry, products, services, competition, and more.
- Accurate and Attractive Meta-Descriptions: Meta-descriptions display on search engine results pages (SERPs) just below your page’s URL and are vital to reducing your bounce rate—think of them as an advertisement for your page that lets searchers know what your page is about before they get there. If they’re intrigued by your snappy meta-description that accurately reflects the content of your page, then they’ll click through to content they know they’re interested in.
Make Your Website Inviting for Visitors
If your website is the equivalent of a crummy studio apartment with dirty socks strewn across the floor and pizza boxes piled on the couch, visitors aren’t going to want to spend a lot of time there. The next step in lowering your bounce rate, then, is for us to spiff your place up by enhancing the usability of your website.
A good way to start is by making your text as readable as possible for the greatest number of people. Remember, visitors with good eyesight aren’t inconvenienced by larger text, but people with poor eyesight definitely find smaller text uncomfortable or even impossible to read. Considering that 42% of Americans are nearsighted, that’s a pretty good argument for increased text size.
Then we can check the layout of your website to see if it’s optimized for familiarity and function. What do we mean by that?
When you walk into a living room, say, you’re used to seeing things set up in certain ways. For example, a couch facing a television with a coffee table between. This is a tried and true set-up; it’s worked for years and will continue to work for the foreseeable future because it’s functional. And because it’s functional, people have worked with it a lot and know how to use it.
That’s exactly the experience you want visitors to have on your website. Your contact information, search function, navigation, sections of content, and other website elements should be in places where visitors are used to seeing them on other websites. If you get cute and try to reinvent the wheel, it’s like walking into a living room where the coffee table is way over behind the TV and the couch is on the wall.
Our Omaha SEO and web design professionals at Big Red SEO have the experience to know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to website user experience, so if you’re having trouble with high bounce rates, let us redesign your website for you. You’ll end up with a fantastic-looking website that’s inviting for visitors and optimized for search engines.
Contact Big Red SEO Today at (402) 522-6468!
Our Omaha SEO professionals know that a high bounce rate on your business website can be a key indicator of bigger problems that need fixing! Google’s algorithm takes bounce rates into account when assigning website rankings, so if you find yourself with higher than normal bounce rates, you could be at risk for a drop in position.
If you’re seeing consistently high bounce rates on your webpages and don’t know what to do to get them down, give our Omaha SEO team a call today at (402) 522-6468—we can identify and fix your website’s problem areas, leading to a lower bounce rate and more quality traffic!