Blog Details

How Small Businesses Can Reduce Website Bounce Rate?

As a small business owner, you create your business website to attract your target audience to your product and service. You take a lot of efforts to bring traffic to your website. But what if people come to your website and bounce off it without engaging with your website content?

What do you mean by bounce rate?

Backlinko explains that bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.

When is higher bounce rate not an issue?

At the same time, in all cases, an increase in bounce rate isn’t a problem. If visitors can find what they are looking for in the landing page of the website itself, then they may not visit another page of your website. There you have satisfied the need of the visitor in the landing page itself. So, a resultant higher bounce rate isn’t an issue; rather, it shows your efficiency.

When is higher bounce rate an issue?

Higher bounce rate could be a concern, if visitors in your website are not taking the action you want them to take. For example, if you want your visitors to add their contact information in your website, but they are bouncing out of your website without adding it, then you have a problem at your hands.

How to reduce higher bounce rate?

Small businesses can take a lot of steps to reduce the bounce rate of their website. Following are the things you must do to reduce bounce rate.

Improve page speed – Everyone knows that page speed is an important search engine ranking factor. But it is also a critical factor in reducing the bounce rate of your website. 

If your website takes a lot of time to download, then there is a higher chance for your visitors to bounce out of your website.  Make sure that your page speed is right up there and reduce chances of visitors bouncing out of your website.

You can use Pagespeed insights to check the page speed of your website. It will also give you tips on how to increase the page speed of your website.

Add search function inside the website – If you add a search box inside your website, then it will make it easier for your visitors to find out what they are looking for. That can reduce the chances of visitors bouncing out of your website.

If they are unable to find what they are looking for, then visitors will move out of your website, increasing your website’s bounce rate.

Write short paragraphs – People like looking at and reading short paragraphs. They are easy on the eye and are easily comprehensible. Try to write short paragraphs instead of big paragraphs in your website.

You can add maximum two sentences in a paragraph. Anything more that could bore down the visitors and there are higher chances of them bouncing out of your website.

Add images and videos – Adding different types of media on your web pages could reduce the bounce rate of websites. If you are a small business, you can add images and videos about your product and services on your websites.

Visitors could get bored if you provide them only textual content instead of a combination of text, images, and videos.

Say no to pop-ups – Pop-ups may look interesting on a web page, but generally pop-ups increase the page download time or decrease page speed. Anything that decreases page speed could negatively affect the bounce rate of your website.

Add a pop-up only if it is critical for your small business. At all other times, make sure to avoid adding pop-ups on your website landing page.

Limit ads – It is true that ads are often lifelines for small business websites. But make sure that you keep ads to the minimum, as ads can distract your visitor and could make them bounce out of your website.

Ads that block the information displayed on your landing pages can really increase your bounce rate.

Prominent CTA button – The Call to Action (CTA) button must be prominently placed in the landing page of your website so that your visitors never miss out on seeing it. A prominent CTA button will drive the attention of the visitor to the action you want them to take.

Using a big button, with a colour that’s distinct from the background of the landing page, is a great way to make your CTA button prominent in your web page.

Add new content – Search engines as well as human visitors like fresh content. Adding fresh content continuously in your website is a great way to keep your visitors’ attention on to your website content.

When you add fresh content in your website, your visitors will keep on coming back to your website and read the content that you add.

Decreasing the bounce rate of your website will go a long way in helping small businesses in gaining more targeted visitors on the website.

If you want to get help in reducing the bounce rate of your website, contact me.