Reduce website bounce rate: tips for local businesses

Attracting visitors to your company website is only part of your digital marketing considerations. You also need to focus on keeping those visitors on your site, and pushing sales or sign ups. Depending on your company goals, and the aims of your website. People that land on your website and quickly move on again contribute to your “bounce rate”. And a website with a high bounce rate, is a website with a problem. But how can your reduce website bounce rate? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web marketing and web design specialists. We work with a range of customers, in a variety of sectors, to provide web marketing, and quality web design, that can really enable growth. As a result, we have produced this guide to reducing website bounce rate for local businesses.

Bounce rates and local businesses

Bounce rates are a challenging metric for any business to measure. Especially local businesses. This is because a user that “bounces” is one that exits your website after only viewing one page. And this can mean one of two things:

1. The user immediately found what they were looking for. And you provided a positive user experience.
2. The information was not immediately available, or perhaps relevant to the user. And you provided a poor user experience.

What this means for local businesses is that this is a metric that cannot be taken at face value. If your website is ranking number one for “how to change a tyre” and you have provided full step by step instructions, with video and image references. And users are accessing this page, then leaving without taking a look around your website. You may well have answered the question fully. And immediately. And provided a user experience that exceeded expectations.

On the other hand, if this web page was instead:

• difficult to read
• hard to understand
• poorly written
• used pop-ups
• had a bad colour scheme
• full of information that isn’t relevant

Then you would be more likely to experience a high bounce rate, because of a poor user experience.

Reduce website bounce rate

So if your website has a high bounce rate, because of negative reasons, what can you do? Well, here are some tips for local businesses:

•  Shorten the page load time- nobody wants to wait around and if your page takes too long to load, users will bounce straight away
• Make it easy to navigate the website- if a user lands on your page, and can’t see the information they want, help them out by making it easier to navigate and search your website
• Make sure your website is well designed- Good images, good layout and a good colour scheme can make a huge difference to a website that isn’t performing as well it should. Just make some changes and see what works.
• Consider the readability- Make your sentences shorter and use less characters per line. You can even increase the line spacing or the size of the text. All of these steps will go some way towards making your content easier to read, and easier to skim over.
• Use headings- Headings are much more likely to be read than the text itself. So make sure your headings are informative, so that users can quickly scan the page to find the section they need

For more information or advice about professional web marketing services, or quality web design, get in touch with the experts here at Pumpkin Web Design