How to lower a website's bounce rate

This morning I am participating in the forum of my subject in the Master in Search Engines which is taught at IDEC (Pompeu Fabra University) and I have seen that some students were not clear about what it is. bounce rate of a website and what may be the causes that lead us to exceed the number that would be logical.

I thought the answer was worth sharing on this blog as well as on the student forum. So here it goes:

What is a website's bounce rate and how to lower it

He bounce rate or bounce rate is the number of people who arrive at the website but do not browse it, divided by the total number of visits to the website.

That is, it reflects visitors who do nothing on our website, except perhaps read… (although we cannot be sure of this last point). If they do not click anywhere on our page, Google Analytics (or the analytics system we are using) cannot calculate how long they have been on the site and also counts them as a bounce.

Our bounce rate should never exceed 40% (for a corporate website or for an e-commerce site)… if it goes above this figure, something is wrong. The causes may be the following:

1. The visitors who come to our website are not part of our target audience segments and therefore are not interested in our page... and they leave –> users who come from a poorly done or fraudulent advertising campaign would be in this subset, but users who come from SEO carried out without clear objectives would also be here.
2. Our product prices are out of the market, so users look at them and leave.
3. The website is too slow… and so they wait for a page to download but think twice before continuing to browse.
4. Our website's usability is poor and users don't know what to do to continue browsing or read more information.
5. Users are browsing on a mobile device and we do not have a version for this type of device or our website is not responsive (which automatically adapts to any screen resolution).
6. The design is unprofessional and therefore the image our company conveys is also unprofessional. Users do not take us seriously and leave.

The above applies to corporate websites. For a blog-type website, the bounce rate may be somewhat higher (around 60%) and that's not a big deal because many users are repeat visitors (visitors who have come before)... users may come to the website, read the new blog post and leave. They won't read any more because they have already read the rest of the information.

On a blog-type website, we should review the bounce rate of new visitors, and ensure that they are interested in related articles, or the most read, most shared, etc. In the case of new visitors, the bounce rate should be below 40%.

How to improve a website's bounce rate

By observing the causes we can already intuit how to reduce the bounce rate:

1. Before planning our SEO and our online advertising campaigns (SEM and the rest) we must be clear about who our target audience is., what segments it comprises, what the people who form part of the segment are like, what they will search for on Google, what websites they will visit, etc. In other words, we must carry out a good marketing analysis before executing any type of action.
2. Before considering any action we must carry out a good analysis of the competition. We need to know the competition's prices, their value proposition, what sets us apart from them... In this way, even if our prices are higher, we can argue why users should buy our products and not those of our competitors.
3. The website should be tested by someone. The speed problem and the usability problem could have been detected with a beta-tester (someone who tests our website before publishing its final version). With a good test we would also detect a lack of persuasiveness or a lack of specificity in the website's objective. So it is 100% advisable that four or five people who do not know the website test it in front of us so we can observe what they do on it, how they navigate and what they pay attention to.
4. At this time it is out of place not to consider having at least one website responsiveWe would be losing almost 30% of visits (depending on the sector we are working in, in Tourism, we would be losing much more).
5. A corporate website should reflect a professional imageNowadays, with the large number of paid templates for WordPress, Joomla, Magento or any other content manager, there is no excuse not to enjoy a professional design on our website.

So now you know... check these 5 points and make sure that the your website bounce rate is the correct one.

I hope these tips are useful to you.

A hug.