A websites bounce rate is the percentage of how many people clicked to a second page within the website. The bounce is when just one page is viewed and then the site is left, either by clicking back or clicking a link away or by closing the browser window.

Having a low bounce rate means that a website is more engaging and trying to get the bounce rate below 30% is ideal. Google interprets a high bounce rate as being associated with a low quality website that visitors don’t browse. Whether rightly or wrongly (wrongly because if someone is looking for a phone number or the page they find contains just what they need and they have no need to navigate a bounce will be added) it is worth trying to get reduce your sites bounce rate.

The best way to review the websites bounce rate is to review the websites 10 most visited pages, this is likely to be related to the higher bounce rate stats. Reducing the bounce rate on the ten most visited pages should be enough to significantly reduce your overall site bounce rate.

The best ways to reduce bounce rates

  1. Ensure that the web pages with high bounce rates load quickly; slow loading pages can cause visitors to quickly drop off.
  2. Remove the phone number from every page. Even though it’s not good to force visitors to have to hunt down a phone number, making it only available on the contact form is a good way to reduce bounce rates.
  3. Add an additional step to content on the page to give visitors a reason to click. This should be done through clear calls to action to encourage visitors to move deeper into the website.

Keeping bounce rates to a minimum are in your best interests, particularly as engagement is now a major feature of the Panda algorithm updates. Whether we like it or not, lengthening the customer journey seems to be Googles way of clarifying engagement, despite this contradicting a focus on quick navigation. Having a low bounce rate does of course mean that the website is engaging which in turn is more likely to result in an enquiry or a sale which has to be good for business.

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