Surfing the internet is a daily occurrence for many. Need to double-check that fact you read on social media? Google it. Working from home and need to research something? Look it up online.

Many people idly scroll websites throughout the day just to pass the time. With over a billion websites, there are only mere seconds to grab their attention. If your website is unsuccessful in this, your site’s bounce rate can damage your overall ranking. The key is to improve the bounce rate.

But first, we need to understand what it is before we can improve it.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Getting people to your website is only the first step. Once they are there, do they stick around for a bit or immediately bounce? Whether the user is reading text, filling out a form, or purchasing a product, how long they stay on the page is important.

If the user immediately backtracks off a page, the site can take a hit in search engine rankings. A high bounce rate can indicate issues with the content, as well. Is it too mundane? Are the links broken? Consulting with the best web development companies can help improve the content.

Once you know a page on your site has a high bounce rate, there are things you can do to improve it.

How to Improve it

Keeping your site’s bounce rate low is important to maintain a high search engine ranking. The higher the ranking, the more visitors to your site. But then how do you keep those visitors from bouncing, thus increasing your bounce rate? It’s a conundrum.

A poorly designed site can be the cause of a high bounce rate. A site can be visually unappealing or difficult to navigate. Both are likely to cause an internet user to bounce and find another site.

Additionally, if your site doesn’t fulfill its purpose, people will leave to find one that does. How do you keep visitors’ eyes on your website?

It can be as easy as adding visually pleasing content, such as YouTube videos. YouTube is a massive platform where you can find videos related to your website without creating your own videos. Rather, use someone else’s content to elevate yours.

As the internet is first a visual medium, your site will have text on it. It’s important to keep in mind that internet users in general have short attention spans. Therefore, you don’t want to bog them down with unending paragraphs of text.

The line break can make or break your site’s bounce rate. One way to keep visitors from getting overwhelmed is to break up your text after a few sentences.

However, it’s not just what they are seeing that can make visitors leave abruptly. It’s if they are seeing it at all.

Does your site take forever to load? If so, many internet users will hit the back button and go to the next site in the search ranking.

That’s something you want to avoid.

Keeping internet users engaged and active on your site is the best way to keep your bounce rate low.