How Do You Decrease Your Website's Bounce Rate?

How Do You Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate?

Posted October 1, 2014

In Search Engine Optimization, Website Design

First of all what is bounce rate? Well it’s the percentage of single-page sessions. An example of bounce rate could be a user has visited your site but left before visiting any other pages.

Our goal here is to reduce the overall bounce rate of the website. One of the most common reasons for high bounce rates on sites is because users can’t find what they are looking for, don’t like the design of the site, or the content just isn’t engaging.

There are also other reasons as to why you want to reduce your bounce rate which isn’t user related. Search engines, specifically Google measures the bounce rate of sites which in turn also helps determines the search engine rankings of your site.

The Bounce Rate Formula

It’s a pretty simple formula!

Bounce Rate = Visitors that leave after one page visits / Total number of visitors.

This calculation can be used site wide or against a single page. This in turn allows you to figure out what kind of information your users are searching for. Using this information you can funnel your resources into what needs to be improved.

But what really is a safe bounce rate?

First of all bounce rates are different depending on the type of site you are running. Below we have some example of what we consider “normal” bounce rates in each industry.

Blogs can have a bounce rate anywhere from 60% to 95%.
Retail can have a bounce rate anywhere from 25% to 50%.
Informative content can have a bounce rate anywhere from 50% to 70%.
Service based sites can have a bounce rate anywhere from 10% to 40%.
Lead generation based sites can have a bounce rate anywhere from 30% to 50%.
Portals based sites can have a bounce rate of 10% to 30%

How can this problem be fixed?

Here is a list of what we typically go through when deciding what needs to be adjusted on a website in order to reduce bounce rate and improve user experience.