An Important Measure for Website Design

Wondering about the effectiveness of your website content and design? A good first clue is to look at your website bounce rate. You can find bounce rate statistics in your Google Analytics account.

Let’s Define Bounce Rate

From Wikipedia:

Bounce rate is an internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site.

High Website Bounce Rate is Not Good

A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not impressed by what they find on your website. And that can be for a variety of reasons:

• Your site isn’t relevant for a search term
• Your site isn’t visually appealing
• Your site is difficult to navigate
• Your site is not mobile friendly
• Your site is slow to load

Review Your Content

You can check the bounce rate of your website pages by reviewing your Google Analytics account. You’ll be able to see the bounce rate for each page. Learn what pages are working, or not working, and analyze why.

Improve Website Design for Ease of Use

If you have pages where the bounce rate is high, implement and test the following tactics to improve the user experience for your website visitors. Check your Google Analytics account periodically to measure the effectiveness of these changes.

• Make your text visually appealing. Many readers can be intimidated by large blocks of text. Break text into smaller paragraphs and use fewer sentences in each paragraph. Use bullet points, subheadings and different text colors to increase the variety.
• Use test callouts and images. Images sprinkled throughout your web pages can keep readers engaged longer than just plain text. And if your topic requires lots of text, break the text into small paragraphs with easy-to-read headlines.
• Incorporate video and animation. Videos are a great way to keep readers engaged with the content of your pages. Videos can be entertaining, informative or both. And videos coupled with text will appeal to a wider variety of site visitors.
• Make content sharing easy with social sharing buttons. Encourage readers to interact with open ended questions and invite them to comment.

Build Relationships with Visitors

These techniques are a great way to reduce bounce rate. But they’re also a great way of building relationships with your visitors. Making your site easy to navigate and easy to use, will improve your rapport with visitors. And you’ll know you’re on the right path when you see your website bounce rate decrease over time.

Need Help? Get Octane

For more information about your bounce rate and website design, contact Octane today. Since 2009, we’ve helped small and medium-sized businesses grow and expand. Let’s review your bounce rates and analyze your website design. Call us today.

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