Everything you should know about bounce rate

It would be utopian to think that you can get all your visitors to convert - there will always be a certain percentage who "bounce". Nor can a shopkeeper expect all his visitors to take an action in the shop - there will always be some who "just look".

Now you know what bounce rate and what a good bounce rate is. So now comes perhaps the most important question: How do you lower your bounce rate?

First and foremost, it's important that your website lives up to what users expect when they click through to it in search results.

For the sake of example, let's start with a collection page of yellow raincoats on the fictitious webshop regnfrakkeshoppen.dk. Clever as she is, the webshop owner has written catchy and eye-catching meta-titles and meta-descriptions to increase the click-through rate and lure customers to the site.

Therefore, the link to the page in Google search results looks like this: ↓

Users who click on the link will expect to find a large selection of yellow raincoats on the site.

Of course, the site must live up to these expectations. If users land on the site and only find 4 models, or only find black raincoats, they will most likely click away again - simply because they don't find what they were promised.

So to make a long story short: keep your promises.

Internal link building is the work of creating links to other relevant subpages on your website. For example, for the webshop owner selling raincoats, it might make sense to link to an internal blog post about maintaining waterproof materials or to a collection page with products for washing and caring for rainwear.

Whatever your industry, there's good reason to look at your internal link structure if you want to reduce your bounce rate. Because with relevant internal links, you're sending your visitors to new pages that will keep their interest.

A good internal link structure also helps to improve your SEO - and therefore your website's ranking on Google. So you can kill two birds with one stone by strengthening your internal link profile.

You've probably tried clicking on a search result and landing on a so-called 404 page - a page that no longer exists. And you've probably been so annoyed that you immediately clicked away from the page again.

That's why you need to avoid the dreaded and despised 404 errors if you want to reduce your bounce rate.

For the sake of example, let's return once again to the webshop selling raincoats. The owner wants to gather all her raincoats on one collection page, where she previously categorised them by brand, colour, etc.

Therefore, she creates one collection page with all raincoats and deletes the pages with the former subcategories - among them the aforementioned collection of yellow raincoats. Unfortunately, this also means that users end up on a 404 page if they click on the search result with yellow raincoats.

You do this by making 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a redirect from a dead page to an existing one. A bit like if you move and report the move to the registry office. When you make redirects, you immediately tell your web server and not least Google that your content has moved to another page.

If you have a WordPress website and have Yoast SEO installed, you can easily and quickly monitor 404 errors and make 301 redirects in the Redirect manager. Click on the "redirects" tab, enter or copy the URL of the dead page in the "Source URL" field and paste the URL of the page to be redirected to in the "Target URL" field.

Then click "Add redirect" - and voila: Now your web server knows that part of your website has been moved to a different address. This way, you prevent your users from landing on a 404 page. And as an added bonus, you strengthen your SEO because you don't lose the value of the link juice generated by the URL.

No, a high bounce rate is not always a bad thing. It can also be a sign that your visitors are finding what they're looking for on the first try. If your visitors search specifically for yellow raincoats and land on the yellow raincoat collection page without clicking through to another page, it could also mean that they found what they were looking for straight away.

Conversely, a high bounce rate is not a success criterion if your entry page or certain landing pages act as a gateway to the rest of your website. Here, your online success depends on your users visiting more than one page.

For example, if you capture users early in the customer journey, it is essential that your users visit multiple sub-pages on your website, otherwise you can be sure that it will not be your website that helps them further in the journey. Or to put it another way: They won't shop with you.

I hope this post has given you a basic understanding of bounce rate. However, we've only just scratched the surface - the toolkit contains many more tools.

Want specialised help to put them into practice? Or are you just too busy to fiddle with SEO technical challenges? Then contact Webamp on 70 60 50 28 or info@webamp.dk and let's have a chat about how our SEO specialists can lower your bounce rate.