Understanding the importance of a website for a brand
For a majority of businesses and organizations [referred to as brand(s) henceforth], their website is their most important tool. A website offers existing and prospective customers, collaborators and associates access to information which a brand wants to be accessed. Just like a departmental store categorizes products into different segments to ensure ease of access for customers, similarly, a website collates and displays information under different heads or pages to ensure clear representation of and easy access to each category of information, be it product listing, corporate announcements or contact details. The more time a visitor spends on a website opening different pages, the better are the chances of him/her getting engaged with the brand and performing the action desired by the brand such as product purchase or registration.
What is Bounce Rate?
While it is all good when visitors land on a website and scroll through its different pages, but what happens when a visitor opens a brand‘s website and exits from the landing page itself. Or what happens when the visitor leaves a webpage without performing any action such as clicking a link, making a purchase, filling up a form, etc. In technical terms, this phenomenon is called bounce with Bounce Rate defined as the percentage of visitors who exit a webpage without performing any action. A high bounce rate certainly does not bode well for a brand as it indicates a lack of interest in the brand.
Why is a high Bounce Rate bad & Ways to decrease bounce rate?
A high bounce rate indicates that the landing page is unable to retain the attention of the visitors long enough for them to become interested in exploring the website. This, in effect, hampers the brand’s engagement with them, resulting in a considerable decline in business prospects.
A high bounce rate doesn’t only hamper conversions but also affects the page ranking of a website on Google, at times shifting it beyond page 1 or 2, thereby vastly decreasing the chances of engagement. A high bounce rate clearly indicates that there could be issues with the website’s content, page layout, or user experience which are rendering it unattractive.
Digital Marketing Services to the rescue
While this situation would set the alarm bells ringing for any brand, it should not necessarily worry itself to death as there is a solution that can fix it all. A boon for any ailing website, Digital Marketing Services offers the easiest and the most comprehensive solutions for reducing the high bounce rate and increasing engagement on a website.
Digital Marketing Services play a huge role in solving the problem of a high bounce rate. They offer a range of solutions to optimize your webpage and in effect your website resulting in a decrease in bounce rate. Some of these are:
Speed optimization to reduce page-load time:
Digital Marketing Services help you understand that high page-load time is a major cause of high bounce Rate as no one wants to wait beyond 2 to 5 seconds for a page to load. Digital Marketing Services also guides you to bring this down by analyzing your load-time and then optimizing it to make it fast. Optimization can be done by:
- Using HTTP Compression
- Moving stylesheet references to the <head> of your HTML document
- Put Script References at the Bottom
- Minimize HTTP Requests
- Reducing 301 redirects
- Placing JavaScript and CSS in External Files
Content Optimization
- Digital Marketing Services use Google Analytics and other such tools for in-depth analysis of landing page to understand bounce patterns and eliminate the cause
- Content optimization for SEO
- Reducing image size
- Refreshing information with relation to old content
- Cutting down traffic for non-targeted keywords
Interface optimization
- Improving the UI & UX for attention retention
- Designing page compatible for multiple screens including desktop and mobile
- Placing ads wisely to avoid jarring interface