How to Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate [Infographic]

How sticky is your website? Are your visitors hanging around, or are they bouncing right off the page? Lucky for you, there’s a metric for that.

Your website’s bounce rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website — in other words, single-page visitors.

If visitors bounce, it suggests they either didn’t find what they were looking for, or the page wasn’t user-friendly.

Unfortunately, a high bounce rate is significant, since it indicates that your website visitors aren’t looking for more content on your site, clicking on your calls-to-action, or converting into contacts. And to inbound marketers whose primary goal is to attract and convert website visitors into highly qualified leads for their sales teams, a high bounce rate is obviously some pretty scary stuff.

Fortunately, QuickSprout has created an awesome infographic that explains why bounce rate is so important, highlights benchmark industry averages for bounce rate, and identifies a variety of changes you can make to help reduce your website’s bounce rate, which you can find in a tool like Google Analytics. Check it out! 

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate 

Set Realistic Expectations: Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates

• Content Websites: 40-60%
• Lead Generation: 30-50%
• Blogs: 70-98%
• Retail Sites:  20-40%
• Service Sites: 10-30%
• Landing Pages: 70-90%

Attract the Right Visitors

• Choose the right keywords to match your content — not just to attract the most number of visitors.
• Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
• Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
• Write attractive, useful meta descriptions for search engine users.
• Improve targeting of online advertising campaigns.

Enhance Usability

• Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bulleted lists, white space, good color contrast, and large headlines.
• Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers .

Speed Up Page Load Time

• Use little or no self-loading multimedia content.
• Set external links to open in new browser windows/tabs.
• Don’t let ads distract from your content: Place static ads to sides, and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.

Provide Quality Content

• Have an obvious main message.
• Use clear headers and subheads.
• Tailor content to intended visitors.
• Use stylish copy and images.
• Make your content error-free.
• Include a clear call-to-action and obvious links to next steps.

What are some other ways you can decrease your website’s bounce rate?