Your website seems to generate a lot of traffic, but for some reason, that traffic doesn’t end up sticking around for very long. Sound familiar?
Every day, millions of people are browsing the internet, clicking on websites, and then clicking out of them only seconds after landing on a page. Maybe it wasn’t the website they were looking for, maybe they found the page difficult to navigate, or maybe the content was just downright uninteresting or hard to digest.
Either way, losing precious traffic is no good – we all know it. To help combat this problem and make your traffic stay, check out these 5 key tips to improve the bounce rate of your website in efforts to land more projects and grow your design firm.
Bounce Rate: What Is It?
This quick-to-ditch behavior contributes to what is called a bounce rate. When users click on a page and navigate away from the site without clicking on any other internal pages, this adds to the website’s bounce rate.
The higher the bounce rate, the worse it is for the website. People are not sticking around for one reason or another. Similar to golf scores, you want your bounce rate to be a lower number.
Lower bounce rates = a ‘sticky’ website. Work towards creating a ‘stickier’ website through better content, a functional web layout, and marketing to the targeted audience.
Through the 5 steps and techniques listed in this article, you can learn to effectively keep your audience engaged and improve bounce rate.
How To Improve Bounce Rate?
1. Create Seamless, Easy-to-Follow Content
Think about Google Images or your Facebook feed. The further you scroll down, it seems as though the page is infinitely loading and expanding. This seamless flow is an effective way of consistently keeping a visitor’s interest.
While it would be unrealistic to expect for your visitors to click and explore the entirety of your website, creating a seamless flow is a simple way of inviting visitors to stay.
Scrolling through a gallery of your latest interior design projects can immediately transition into a gallery of featured furniture pieces, and so on.
Having different sections overlap each other on the landing page helps in giving visitors a sample of what you have to offer on your website.
Another important aspect of creating a seamless flow is creating an easy-to-read format. No one wants to read walls of text, especially when they might be skimming for information.
*Pro-tip: Images are everything for an interior design website – don’t hold back on communicating a message through visuals – your users will love that!
Separate paragraphs into sections with titles. Compose digestible paragraphs, breaking them up as needed. Make bullet-point lists when possible – a great format to follow for a landing page content. It’s better to cut straight to the point when it comes to maintaining the interest of your visitors.
Long story short here: Improve your user flow = improve bounce rate.
2. Pinpoint The Bouncers
Although the traffic may be high on your website, it becomes a problem when visitors do not stay to browse. There are various reasons as to why this may happen.
For example, Google Analytics can tell you that a majority of your visitors are Mozilla Firefox users. Your website isn’t properly rendered to run on Firefox, leading to crashes, ultimately causing your visitors to exit out of the page.
Another instance where visitors may be bouncing away from your website is when you target the incorrect audience. As a designer, knowing your ideal target audience and being clear about that will help users know if they have found the right design team.
It would be irrelevant to people in the health industry, causing them to exit upon reaching your page. Poor advertising or advertisement placement may be the reason for random traffic, so consider your marketing strategy too.
Tools such as Google Analytics and Crazy Egg can help you analyze the visitors who are browsing your website.
3. Design For Multiple-device Compatibility
People are inevitably going to be browsing the internet on devices other than a desktop computer or a laptop. Nowadays, most people prefer to browse on their smartphones or tablets for convenience and accessibility.
If your website isn’t properly optimized for mobile devices, this may be another reason that contributes to a high bounce rate. People might be getting frustrated trying to load your page on their phone, but when they find that it isn’t supported on a mobile device, they exit.
If you need help optimizing your website for mobile screens, reach out to a Bizop representative for a free consultation.
Today it’s not an option, you MUST be mobile responsive to improve bounce rate.
4. Integrate Various Multimedia
We are slowly transitioning into a society that prefers to be visually stimulated through videos, images, games and the like. For some, reading text is becoming a tedious task that people prefer to skim or skip.
In regards to design, it isn’t difficult to accompany a section of text with a relevant visual. By pairing the appropriate multimedia with your content, it may spark curiosity and invite visitors to stay on your website and see what you have to say.
For instance, it would be much more appealing to provide a photo of a recent interior design project that you completed along with an accompanying blog or text post. The text post is going to provide the content and information while the media acts as a supplementary visual.
It is important to keep your audience engaged and interested in what you have to offer on your website.
Our Favorite Interior Design Websites.
Find inspiration with these well put together websites for interior designers.
VIEW5. Reduce Load Times
There’s nothing more annoying than a website that takes forever to load. No one likes to wait, especially the modern internet surfer who expects information to be at their fingertips in an instant.
With other websites of competitors also available, there isn’t anything stopping your visitors from exiting your page and finding the information they need elsewhere. After all, the longer it takes for your page to load, the more you are testing your visitor’s patience.
By properly optimizing the images and code of your website in addition to deleting excessively heavy scripts, widgets, and plugins, you can successfully minimize your website’s loading times – thus improving your bounce rate.
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Improve Bounce Rate For A Better Website
Whether you realize it or not, the bounce rate is a common problem that many website owners encounter.
You want people to be interested in your website, don’t you? And you want people to not only spend time on your landing page but also to explore and navigate the rest of the website, right?
After all, your website is an extension of who you are, and you want it to be utilized to its maximum potential. A high bounce rate would be the equivalent to meeting people at a party, then having everyone dismiss you and walk away before you even get the chance to open your mouth.
Don’t let people walk away from your page!
Keep them engaged and curious through a continuous flow.
Entertain them with striking visuals and video clips. Appropriate multimedia accompanied with interesting content conveys a lot more than a static website.
Format your site so that it’s mobile-friendly. Remember to market to your specific targeted audience, and don’t keep them waiting!
Still need some help improving your bounce rate? Maybe you don’t have the time to mess around with trying to fix it. Our SEO services are designed to help bring in more targeted traffic that will “stick” around. Check out our solutions today!