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If you’ve analyzed your digital marketing company’s website recently, you’ve probably looked into its current bounce rate—and you may have asked yourself, “why are so many people leaving my website without clicking anything?” When a new visitor’s session is cut short, it could be due to a lack of engagement opportunities on your website.
Luckily, there are plenty of strategies that can help your company reduce its website bounce rate. In this post, we’ll be sharing some key action items you can implement to keep your visitors from bouncing so soon.
understand that bounce rate does not equal the time spent viewing a page
This is a very common mistake that’s easy to mix up! Though there may be a correlation between the two, your website’s bounce rate is actually not the same as the amount of time someone is spending on a web page; it is a measurement of the interactions a person took during their session on your website. In other words, as a person clicks more to different pages—and especially when they click a call-to-action—this will reduce your bounce rate. As a result, it’s important to note that just because a page has a high bounce rate, this doesn't mean no one is reading the page.
While it’s common for a blog post to have a higher bounce rate—given that the page’s main objective is to simply have someone read the post—a high bounce rate on your main website pages is worth looking into further. With that being said, let’s take a look at a few strategies to lower your website’s bounce rate!
If you’re still unsure of how your website bounce rate works, check out this infographic from digital marketing expert, Neil Patel for more information.
Structure your website in a way that makes navigation easy for visitors
For first-time viewers, a new website can feel like a maze of links. You might think having more links spread around your website will encourage more clicks and keep bounces to a minimum. While this might make people click more, it certainly won’t be enriching their browsing experience and helping them learn more about your company. Ideally, you want a visitor to leave your website with some knowledge in hand.
Your website architecture needs to feel logical and follow a linear flow that makes it easy to reach Point B from Point A—and easy to backtrack to Point A as needed. A great way to keep visitors on the right path on your website is to make sure outgoing links open in a new tab. This prevents visitors from leaving your website altogether if they are redirected to an external webpage—and the previous tab from your own website will remain opened.
You will also want to organize your navigation bar to be as clear as possible; you should only need a simple About Us page, Contact page, Products/Services, Resources, and a Career page (if applicable). Then, keep your navigation clean with dropdown menus. An example of this would be a dropdown from Resources that shows separate pages for your blog, downloads, and case studies if you have those to offer.
Provide call-to-action opportunities for lead conversion
In addition to keeping your website navigation organized, you’ll also want to encourage visitors to stay on your site through calls-to-action (CTAs). These act as key conversion points, most commonly used as content offers at the end of a blog post. A CTA brings a visitor further along the conversion path and keeps them invested in your website. As a result, they’ll navigate to more pages on your website instead of bouncing early.
Naturally, your CTAs will need to stand out and provide an enticing offer. This doesn’t mean overpopulating a webpage with multiple CTAs, as this can be overwhelming and discouraging for visitors. If your digital marketing company has just published a new downloadable content piece—such as an eBook or white paper—display these offers on relevant webpages that align with a logical conversion path.
For example, you may have a page on your website that showcases your company’s knowledge of brand development. Use this as the perfect spot to share a new content piece like a “How to Guide” for best branding practices.
Additional quick tips to keep Visitors from bouncing early
- Optimize your mobile website to prevent loading errors. Plenty of visitors are coming to your digital marketing website from their phone; their browsing experience shouldn’t be hindered as a result!
- Prevent cluttered copy from pushing visitors away. Space out your website content with bullet points, line-breaks, section headers, and some relevant images.
- Introduce chatbots to your website to help with visitor questions. This might not seem like it has much to do with your bounce rate, but you’d be surprised how many visitors are leaving your website out of sheer confusion. Having a chatbot around can help point them in the right direction and even offer resources—such as a blog post link—to give additional information.
With these strategies in hand, your digital marketing company can encourage more visitors to continue browsing your website and convert to leads. If you’d like to check out some more website design and digital marketing tips from thinkdm2, feel free to visit our blog!
