A company’s website is an invaluable tool for connecting with potential customers and driving sales. But it’s not enough to just get visitors to your website — you want your website to move visitors along their customer journey to lead to more conversions. That can’t happen if visitors click right off your site after visiting a single page.

One way to reduce the percentage of site visitors who immediately click away is to improve the content on your site. Some small changes in your content can make a big difference in keeping users on your site longer.

Use this guide to reduce your website’s bounce rate with engaging, informative content.

What is a Website Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate on your website is the percentage of visitors who land on a page and then leave the site without engaging further. These visitors don’t click on a link to another page, fill out any forms on your site, or make a purchase. They simply “bounce” back to the search results or website that referred them to a page on your website.

To calculate the bounce rate for your website, divide the number of one-page sessions on your site by the total number of sessions. This should yield a percentage between 0% and 100%. Ideally, companies prefer to keep their bounce rates as low as possible. Lower bounce rates mean visitors are spending more time on your site engaging with your content, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

If you’re not happy with your current website bounce rate, don’t worry. By writing captivating, quality content, you can reduce your website bounce rate and improve your overall digital marketing strategy.

8 Tips for Reducing Your Website Bounce Rate with Better Content

To improve the content on your website and bring down your bounce rate, try these tips:

Write for Humans, Not Algorithms

As tempting as it may be to write for algorithms so your website ranks higher in search results, instead, focus primarily on writing for people. Your content should meet the needs of your readers if you want them to stick around on your site. Provide them with content that’s compelling, engaging, and offers solutions to their problems.
When you’re writing content for your website, start with a clear objective for each piece. Ask yourself:

• Who are you trying to reach with the content?
• What does that target audience want and need?
• What information will be useful to them?

Then, spend time researching and finding information that will deliver value to your readers. Make sure all the information you include serves your objective for the piece.

Choose Your Topics Carefully

The topics you cover on your site play a key role in getting visitors to your site and keeping them there. Make sure you’re writing on topics that people are searching for to reduce your website bounce rate.

A great way to gain insights into what people are searching for is to check Google’s “People also ask” section on the results page. If you search keywords relevant to your business in Google, this section will show you related questions that users ask. You can also do more in-depth research with content optimization software to determine what your audience is searching for online.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. You should write about topics they’re interested in and want to learn more about. If you have social media accounts for your business, you can even ask your followers what topics they would most like you to cover.

Inject Excitement into Your Content

Sometimes, the topics that are most valuable to your audience aren’t inherently the most exciting. That’s okay. You just have to find ways to inject some excitement into your writing to keep your visitors engaged.

That doesn’t mean you should exaggerate or stray off-topic to make your articles more interesting. Instead, try using attention-grabbing words and dynamic sentences to cover the information. Avoid passive voice and bland, repetitive sentence structure. If it fits with your brand voice, consider using some humor in your pieces when appropriate. Even small bits of excitement or humor can help keep your audience engaged and prevent them from bouncing off the page.

Stay Current

Outdated content that’s no longer relevant to your audience is only going to hurt your website bounce rate. If you want visitors to stay on your website and engage with your content, you need to make sure everything is up-to-date.

That doesn’t mean you have to go through your content every day to check for information that’s since changed, but make a regular habit of updating your content as necessary. If statistics or facts that you included in your content have changed, remove or update them. Fix or delete broken links in your content, too. You can find broken links on your site with a tool like Google Search Console.

Along the same lines, make sure you’re regularly adding new content to your website to keep up with news or trends in your industry. Publishing content that covers trending topics can be a great way to bring new visitors to your site.

Keep Your Content Scannable

Website visitors often won’t read every word on the page — no matter how interesting and valuable each word is. They tend to scan through content to find the sections most relevant to them, instead. On average, internet users read about 20% of the text on any given page.

To keep readers on your page, you have to format your content so it’s easily scannable. How do you do that? Avoid large paragraphs with nothing to break them up. These blocks of text are intimidating and can cause your visitors to bounce off your site.

Make your content more approachable by breaking it up with frequent subheadings and bulleted lists. You should also utilize short sentences and short paragraphs whenever possible. The easier it is for visitors to find the information they want, the more likely it is that they will stick around on your site.

Cut Out the Fluff

When digital marketers and business owners are trying to build out the content on a website, it’s not unusual to add extra, unnecessary information known as filler or “fluff.” This information isn’t relevant to the audience and just gets in the way of valuable content. If visitors to your site see too much fluff, they’re likely to click off the page and continue their search elsewhere.

As you’re developing your content, consider starting with an outline of the key ideas you want to cover. This can help keep you on topic and steer you away from adding fluff. It’s also important to reread your content once you’re finished writing and delete any fluff that slipped through the cracks. Remove overly wordy phrases, redundant points, and cliches.

When you’re not sure whether something is fluff, always ask yourself — does this information add value to the piece? If not, you can safely delete it from your content.

Speak Your Audience’s Language

Professionals within an industry generally have jargon and technical language that they use when speaking to each other. It’s easy to let this language accidentally slip into your writing if you’re not careful. Remember, though: your website content isn’t meant for your colleagues or your supervisor, it’s for your customers. Write in words that they easily understand.

If you use terms your audience probably isn’t familiar with already, make sure to clearly define them. They should walk away feeling engaged and informed, not frustrated. Your audience won’t stick around on your site very long if your content is confusing and overly technical.

Use a Clear Call to Action

One of the best ways to ensure your visitors stay on your site and visit other pages is to direct them straight to those pages. Think about the specific action you want visitors to take once they read your content. Some examples of actions you might want visitors to take include:

• Visiting the Contact Us page on your site
• Sharing the content on social media
• Checking out one of your product pages
• Downloading a guide
• Signing up for an email list
• Commenting on the content

Prompt them to take that desired action with a single clear call to action. Even if you want your audience to take more than one action, it’s best to stick with one call to action. Multiple calls to action can confuse and overwhelm readers, reducing the chances they will take any of your desired actions. Make sure your call to action is compelling and clearly visible so your readers take action.

Other Tips for Reducing Your Website Bounce Rate

Beyond improving your website content, what else can you do to bring down your website bounce rate? Try these tips:

Make sure your website is optimized for mobile

The majority of global website traffic now comes from mobile devices, and that percentage only gets larger each year. With the growth of mobile traffic, it’s increasingly important to make sure your website is mobile-optimized. If users try to access your website using their smartphones or tablets and discover that it’s not mobile-friendly, they’ll probably get frustrated and click away to a different website.

A mobile-optimized website automatically reformats content on mobile devices to ensure it displays properly. Pictures change size according to the size of the user’s screen. You should also ensure buttons and links are larger on your mobile site so they’re easier to click on through a touchscreen. Optimizing for mobile improves the user experience and keeps visitors from fleeing to other sites.

Ensure easy site navigation

You want to remove any barriers to visitors staying on your site, and complicated site navigation is a big one. If your audience can’t easily locate and navigate to other pages on your site, expect them to leave quickly. Avoid poor site navigation like illogical drop-down menus, broken links, generic labels, and too many options.

Instead, make sure your navigation bar is easily accessible with descriptive labels. It should be as easy as possible for site visitors to find the content they’re looking for. Use intuitive, simplistic navigation to keep visitors from bouncing off your site.

Reduce your website load time

Your website’s load time — the time it takes for one of your web pages to fully load on screen — plays a key role in determining your bounce rate. The longer your load time, the higher your bounce rate will likely be.

Research from Google shows that the likelihood a user will bounce increases by 32% as page load time increases from one second to three seconds. If a site takes 10 seconds or more to load, the odds of a bounce more than double. Take measures to improve your website load time such as:

• Optimizing your images to the ideal size and file format
• Compressing your content
• Investing in a performance-optimized hosting provider
• Reducing your redirects
• Enabling browser caching

Improve your site’s search functionality

Sometimes, visitors to your site have a clear idea of what they want to see next, they just don’t know how to navigate there. In these instances, you need a strong internal search functionality to help them find the content they want to see. If visitors search key terms on your site and can’t find relevant results, they probably won’t stick around.

Limit Ads and Popups

Ads and popups that cover the content on your website can lead to a higher bounce rate. Site visitors generally find them intrusive and frustrating. Rather than eliminating the popups and continuing to read your content, many visitors simply click away at the first obstruction. Try to avoid or at least limit your use of distracting ads and popups.

Turn to Brandastic for a Top Digital Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a powerful digital marketing channel that can help you develop relationships with your target audience and drive conversions. Improving the content on your site can also help you improve key metrics like your website bounce rate. Don’t overlook the importance of great content.

If you need more help improving your website content, look no further than Brandastic. As a full-service digital marketing agency, Brandastic can help brands ignite their potential with efforts across all marketing channels. Check out Brandastic’s content marketing services to start developing captivating, impactful content.