Bounce rate is the amount of people who click on your website or link then immediately exit the page. A high bounce rate means people are visiting your site and leaving quickly.
How to lower your bounce rate
- Lead with what’s important
Get to the point. Do not bury your lead three paragraphs into your blog or halfway down your homepage. Make it as easy as possible to find what they’re looking for.
Think of those annoying food blogs, where all you want is the ingredients and the recipe, and you find yourself scrolling through the history of the dish. That is a classic example of burying your lead. A potential customer presses ‘back’ and finds another site that is offering the same dish and gives it up front.
- Make sure your content is relevant
Clickbait for the sake of clicks but that has no substance, or a headline about something that is totally irrelevant to your product will cause people to click and bounce.
- Precise SEO headlines
Having a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) headline that is precise will help customers to know if it’s something they want to click on before they click and bounce. This will reduce your bounce rate.
A good SEO headline is like a mullet – business in the front, party in the back. Get the keywords upfront, so they are clear and precise, rather than burying them behind fluff. For example, if you want customers to know how to fix their sink, write “Fix your sink: things you wish you knew before”. By contrast, “Things you wish you knew before you tried to fix your sink” is burying the keywords.
Why bounce rate matters: The algorithm
Google is constantly changing its algorithm. There are always some core principles. Bounce rate is among them.
If it sees a lot of Googlers clicking on your link then leaving your site quickly, the algorithm will punish you. It will consider you an untrustworthy source and push you down the ranking. You do not want to be on page two of Google – A study by Backlinko found that only 0.63% of Google searches resulted in a click on something on the second page.
Lowering bounce rate is an easy way to move up the Google rankings and let the clicks roll in.
