Why Website Visitors ‘Bounce’ (And How to Fix It With Avada)

High traffic volume is worth nothing if visitors aren’t sticking around long enough to become even a lead or prospect, let alone a customer.

When it comes to converting visitors on your website, half the battle is won by ensuring they simply stay on your website in the first place.

In other words, you should be working on reducing your ‘bounce rate’, which is exactly what we’re going to explore in this article.

‘Bounce Rate’ Explained

In general terms (as the precise definition is up for debate), bounce rate is the percentage of people who don’t stay on a website long enough to consume the content provided. To ‘bounce’ is to visit a website and leave without exploring the website.

The technical measure of this changes, but according to Google’s default standards, it is any single-page visit to a website.

Generally speaking, when a visitor bounces, it indicates that they weren’t interested in what your website has to offer. This could be because you’re not offering what they need, or you weren’t able to convey what you were offering quickly and succinctly enough – you didn’t do a good enough job of ‘selling’ your site to them.

It’s that second group of visitors that we’re going to focus on in this article.

How to Identify Pages On Your Site With High Bounce Rates (The Efficient Way)

We’re going to work efficiently by targeting those pages on your site that attract many visitors and have a relatively high bounce rate. Follow the steps below to identify those ‘high value’ pages.

Start by logging into Google Analytics and navigate to to the Audience tab:

Next, click on Users Flow, then choose where it says All Sessions and select Bounced Sessions from the provided dropdown:

This will provide you with a list of your most visited pages with the highest bounce rates. Now that you’ve got your list, let’s start work on improving those bounce rates.

How to Identify and Improve Common Website Issues That Boost Bounce Rates

Typically, the pages with the highest bounce rates are experiencing one of two problems – either the traffic or ‘type’ of visitor is wrong, or there’s an issue with the content on the page.

In this article we’re going to focus on easy steps you can take to make each page on your site as relevant and easy to navigate and digest as possible. In essence, we’re going to break down the barriers that exist between the visitor and your site, which will compel them to hang around for longer and ultimately become a customer.

Site-Wide Elements That Affect Bounce Rate

Overall Site Design

Your site design should be clean, display well on any platform, and be easy to read. What this means for you will depend on your target audience. Avada provides more than 15 different responsive styles that allow you to create a unique and compelling design for your visitors.

Clear Navigation

By providing clear navigation points, your visitors will have somewhere else to go. This can be top-level menu items, typically found floating at the top of a website, but can also include internal links included in the page’s content.

Avada offers in-depth navigational elements that help you build a useful guide for your visitors to find what they’re looking for on your site.

Load Time

You only have a few seconds for your website to load before a user decides it’s not worth waiting for and leaves immediately. Avada helps you by creating a cohesive, custom website that loads quickly and can be easily optimized for performance with top performing WordPress plugins such as W3 Total Cache. You can also follow our page speed tips.

Page-Specific Elements That Affect Bounce Rate

Content Relevance

Your search engine optimization needs to tie in closely with the content you are actually providing on your webpage. If you title your post, ‘3 Quick Fixes for a Broken Taillight’, your post should be about three fixes for a broken taillight – not a sales landing page without any of the promised content. While that is a broad example, the same principle applies on a micro level – keep your content relevant at all times!

Engagement

Not only should your content be relevant, it needs to be engaging too. Kick it off with a brief and compelling summary of what to expect on that page.

From there, use images, videos, other interactive media and clean typography to keep the reader engaged. Avada makes including media incredibly easy – from Google Maps, to stylish tables, sliders, and customised embeds.

Calls to Action (CTA)

One of the easiest ways to improve your bounce rate is by including a specific call to action on every page. This takes the guesswork out of what page you’d like your visitor to read next! When you don’t include a call to action, your reader isn’t given a clear reason to continue clicking through your website.

Avada provides a wide variety of buttons and shortcodes that make providing clear and visible calls to action incredibly easy.

Related Posts

Navigation can be included anywhere, including right at the end of a post. If the reader didn’t take your call to action, they may find posts you’ve written with similar content interesting! There are many plugins for including related posts, and Avada also has built in functionality for them.

How Avada’s Flexibility Can Help You Reduce Bounce Rate

Doing all of the above will put you in great stead, but as an Avada user, you can take advantages of its advanced functionality to reduce bounce rate on some of the most important pages on your site.

Your Homepage and Blog

The ‘buying cycle’ is the circular process that customers all experience before, during, and after purchasing something. These stages include:

By using this cycle, you can begin to figure out what people are looking for based on what stage they’re in. For example, people just entering the cycle may not have any need awareness, so they should see more topic-focused content like your blog or other sources of information.

Avada provides a spectacular amount of customisation for both your home page and blog archives, to help you provide the exact content these users are looking for.

Case Studies and Portfolios

While people are assessing their alternatives and evaluating their options, they’ll most likely want to research case studies and view portfolios.

Avada provides extensive portfolio and features pages that make it easy to elegantly offer just this kind of information.

Your Pricing and/or Product Pages

Once people have reached the decision stage, they are ready to move forward into some form of ‘next step’ to discuss pricing or make a purchase. Avada offers pricing forms, highly functional contact forms, as well as shop and product launch pages.

Conclusion

Visitors bounce from a website when your pages don’t provide them with what they’re looking for.

Once you know how to find the most popular pages with the highest bounce rates, you can fix the pages on your website with the highest bounce rates by looking for a mismatch in what a searcher is looking for (versus what they’re seeing), and fixing page problems like poor navigation or formatting. Avada comes with a variety of page templates, tools and features to help you quickly and easily create beautiful pages for visitors exactly when they’re looking for it.

Have you experienced high bounce rates on your own website? If so, how have you dealt with it? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Why Website Visitors ‘Bounce’ (And How to Fix It With Avada) appeared first on Theme Fusion.