Nix That Bounce Rate and Watch Your Content Convert
If you’ve fallen into a love-hate relationship with your website metrics, welcome to the club. They can provide so much information, yet so little insight. Analytics can raise more questions than they answer, and it’s so easy to tumble down the rabbit hole, only to land in a universe that feels like the other side of the mirror.
One of the easiest website metrics to get a handle on is bounce rate. Unless your customers are all Tigger, you want to keep the bounce rates on your website to a minimum. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the metric and help you figure out how to take the bounce out of every ounce of your content.
As long as you’re here, check this one out too: Create Content That Keeps ‘Em Coming Back for More
What Is Bounce Rate and Why Is It Bad?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that land on a page and then leave your site without visiting another page. They just view the one page they landed on, then bounce off. Each page has its own bounce rate.
When visitors don’t stick around for more content, you’ve lost the chance to convert them. And you have no guarantee they’ll come back.
It’s like the fish that nibbles on the worm and swims away before you can hook it.
You’ll always have some bouncing from your website, for various reasons. For example, they might land on your Contact page, submit the form, and hop away again. Plus, you just won’t keep every visitor on your site, no matter how good your content is.
Hey man, bouncers gonna bounce.
So how high of a bounce rate is too high? Good question, except it’s probably the wrong question.
The better question is, what is your bounce rate now, and how can you improve it? Because, it doesn’t matter what a “good” bounce rate is — you’ll always be working to get it lower, whether you have a sky-high bounce rate or an impressively low one.
That said, for B2B companies across all industries, the average bounce rate is 61.9 percent. (Notice I didn’t say it’s a good rate.) If you’re seeing numbers above 70 percent, you need to start fixing your content, ASAP.
Take the Bounce Out of Your Content
Bad bounce rates are invariably due to bad content. Websites with the best content generally have lower bounce rates, unless something is wrong. Unfortunately, “bad content” can mean almost anything, and it’s really hard to directly find out why someone bounced from your site, since they’re no longer there.
So that means you get to play detective. Find the pages that have the highest bounce rates on your site and do a quick audit. Look for the following issues, which often contribute to bouncing.
Headline bait-and-switch
People hate surprises. Except when they’re pleasant surprises. But for the purposes of this point, people hate surprises. Specifically, they hate it when they click on a link to your blog article based on the headline — only to discover what’s delivered doesn’t match the promise.
A headline is a promise. It says, “Check out this content, and this is what you’ll get.” For example:
- Never Use These Words in Your LinkedIn Profile
- Your Small Business Isn’t Hiding from Cyberattackers
- Your Remote Employees Need a Healthy Office Culture Too!
- Why Dash Cams Don’t Reduce Fleet Accidents
Each of these headlines makes a promise. It gives you a teaser about what you’ll get when you consume the content.
If the headline makes one promise and your email or blog article delivers something completely different, it’s like a bait-and-switch tactic. And if you’ve ever been the victim of a bait and switch, you probably remember the feeling of being scammed.
Bait-and-switch headlines erode customer trust, and they’re more likely to drive people away than to keep them — no matter how good your content may be.
How to spot a bad headline: Read the headline and ask yourself what the article should be about. Then check the article and see how closely you guessed correctly. (Obviously, this test works best if you don’t already know what the article is about.)
Content you love
…as opposed to content your customers love.
Your content shouldn’t be about you or your product or your service. It should be about your customers. When it comes down to it, your buyers don’t care about your company, they care about fixing their problems. They aren’t impressed by your features, they’re impressed by the right solutions.
This is where the buyer persona and the buyer’s journey come into play. I won’t unpack them here, but here it is in a nutshell: you need to understand your customers and what their pains, motivations, and priorities are. Write content that will meet them where they’re at and provide real and tangible value.
How to spot the wrong content: Read the content through your customer’s eyes. Will they find it truly helpful and valuable, or does it miss the mark?
It’s hard to read
You can have fantastic content, but a lousy content experience. If the look and feel of your webpage is hard on the eyes, you could be chasing visitors away.
Content should be skimmable and nicely formatted. A wall of text is overwhelming to the eyes and makes the brain work harder to make sense of it all. The same is true if you have a visual chaotic mess. It’s like Neo trying to make sense of the Matrix’s code for the first time.
Present a clean page with lots of white space, and follow these formatting guidelines:
- Optimize for mobile (this is BIG)
- Keep paragraphs short
- Use section headings to chunk your content
- Use bullet lists to organize short points
- Include a featured image at the top
- Make sure the text size and font are easy to read
No calls to action
Let’s say a new visitor finds your latest blog article. They read till the end and loved your content. Now what?
If you don’t lead them to the next step, they won’t take it. Chances are, they’ll simply close that tab and move on.
A call to action (CTA) tells your audience what to do next. It leads your prospects to the next step in becoming a customer, whether it’s subscribing to your blog, or downloading a whitepaper, or requesting a demo. But if you don’t tell them what to do next, they won’t do anything. And then they’re gone.
You’d be surprised how many companies don’t have any CTAs on their content. EVERY PIECE OF CONTENT should have a call to action. Otherwise, that big fish won’t get hooked.
One word of caution: don’t pop the question too early. People want to buy, but they hate being sold to. If you try to close the deal too early, you’ll scare that fish away.
Want to supercharge your CTAs? Check out these Top 9 Tips for a Powerful CTA.
Okay, What Now?
Check your website stats for the pages with the highest bounce rates. Select the top five or ten, and check each of them for these common issues.
When you think you’ve spotted the culprit, make the appropriate fix and continue monitoring the page. It could take several weeks, or even months before you have an accurate read on the results. That’s okay — just give it the time it needs, then go back and look for other opportunities to optimize, if needed.