Your website speaks volumes on your brand, it is an indicator of your product or service that consumers take seriously. As a brand, you want to make sure that your site is representing your products or services accurately and in the best light. There are many key metrics that show how you are performing on your website, but a slow website load speed can dramatically increase your bounce rate. 

A website bounce rate is a term used in website traffic analysis, it represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave. Ideally, as a business, you want a bounce rate of 26-40% and anything over 70% is cause for alarm. 

Why Is My Website Bounce Rate So High?

Customers go to your website to learn more about who you are and what you offer; if you have uninformative content, this could be contributing to an increased bounce rate. If your site content does not address the needs or concerns or a customer, they have no reason to stay. Customers are increasingly likely to leave a brand for a new one that serves their needs. The right content and copy on a website can convince a customer to stay on your site. 

It is human nature to make a judgment within a matter of seconds. If your site is disorganized, hard to read or understand, or just visually unappealing— visitors are likely to leave. User experience is key in website design and can appeal to customers to navigate through your site. 

A slow website or technical error is a common factor in high bounce rates. Customers do not want to hit a roadblock when trying to learn more about your product or service. If a plugin goes down or has a slow loading window, a customer will quickly leave your site. Anything taking longer than a few seconds to load is far too long.47% of customers expect a website to load in under two seconds! A single-second improvement in website load speed can astronomically increase site traffic and conversions. 

Secrets to Improving Your Website Load Speed and Bounce Rate

Is your bounce rate getting out of hand? Follow these simple steps to decrease your bounce rate and improve your site metrics. 

Create more landing pages

If you are getting a high bounce rate from your PPC strategy, chances are that you need to redesign or create more landing pages. Try creating landing pages that solve a particular customer pain point and increase site traffic. 

Match the need for speed

Since website load speed is such a large contributor to high bounce rates, it is important that you tackle increasing your site speed. The easiest way to speed up your site is to add a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN caches copies of your site on servers around the world, this allows your site to be delivered faster. Regardless of how fast your site is, it can never tackle the issue of distance and a CDN solves this issue. You can also optimize your website performance by optimizing images, reducing HTTP requests, and font performance optimization.

Get rid of interruptions

Popups can be a necessary evil, as some brands have seen up to a 46% increase in email signups by using a popup. However, irrelevant popups are seen as annoying and distracting to customers. This takes some testing and strategy, test different time windows or location popups for full optimization. 

Clearly guide customers

If the navigation of your site is unclear or disorganized, customers don’t know where to go and will commonly leave your site. You have to make sure that a new customer can easily navigate through your site and find the content they are looking for. You can use many heatmap plugins for your site to find where users are getting confused. 

Use your phone

In 2020, mobile devices generate around 51% of all website traffic. This means that making sure your mobile site is responsive and speedy is increasingly important. You should be testing the speed and user experience of your site on a multitude of mobile devices and editing your website accordingly. 

Aesthetics and content matter

The design of your website matters to customers, it should be visually appealing and direct. Customers do not spend time on sites that look like they were just thrown together, so it is vital that you spend time on the design of your site. This includes the copy that is on your site! Your copy should be easy to read and understand. You can use tools to test the readability of your content— and since the average adult reads at a 9th-grade level, we recommend that you do!

We said it before, and we will say it again: Content matters!

Having up to date and relevant content can dramatically increase site traffic and time spent on your site. Having current content also allows you to appear higher in Google search results.

Linked up

Backlinking and internal linking is a great SEO practice and is proven to increase your search rankings. What you likely didn’t know though, is that it can also help decrease your bounce rate. Internal links are commonly clicked on by your site users and can keep them on your site. During this process, don’t forget to check your links to make sure they are not broken. Broken links are a contributing factor to a high bounce rate, even though it is an easy fix!

Schedule a meeting with one of our specialists to find out more!

Word of mouth is the most popular way of expressing feedback. When someone is researching your brand, they will take to Google™ and reviews. This is the first impression leads will get of your brand, which makes it imperative that you position your brand to get business reviews in a positive light. 

What happens when you have an awful experience at a restaurant, or you order something online and it is not what you expected? You tell everyone! Your sister, father, friend, significant other all know about how much you detested your experience. The same is to be said if you had a positive experience with a product or service.

Why Brand Perception and Reviews Matter

A recent study shows that today’s buyers are more knowledgeable but less brand loyal than ever before. The customers of today are sharing their experiences more frequently, and potential customers are taking these reviews seriously. With the switch of brand loyalty, customers are quick to switch to a brand that meets their needs and expectations. 

The average customer will make a judgment on your brand based on what they read in a review, and what it says online about your brand can be a make or break decision. 90% of customers read reviews before a purchase decision.  A positive online reputation, based on positive reviews, can make a customer increasingly likely to choose your service and then recommend your brand. In fact, 60% of customers will refer friends to a brand that provided a positive experience. However, a negative experience means that you are not only losing out on these referrals but that they will tell other potential customers why they would not recommend you. Studies have shown that up to 80% of consumers will think twice about doing business with a brand that has negative online reviews.

How Can Negative Reviews Impact Your Online Presence

Google can be a tricky beast, especially when it comes to negative reviews. Negative reviews have a large impact on your business reputation and the search results on Google. If you have a large amount of these unfavorable reviews, Google will be less likely to show your business under search results. This is especially true if you do not have relevant and frequent content on your website. 

How to Get Reviews

The total number of reviews offsets negative ones and increased localized search rankings. If you have 25-100 reviews, it is unlikely that customers will read through them all. This is not to say one negative review will diminish your business, customers are looking for a generalized consensus when it comes to brands. To put it short: more reviews = higher search rankings, increased leads, increased sales, increased revenue. In this case, more is more! 

So, how do you increase your reviews? Try some of our tested tactics:

1. Ask! The easiest way to increase your reviews is to ask. If you have a happy customer, ask them to write a review.
2. Send a follow-up email. Send your customers a follow-up email after service and ask them to leave a review, make sure that your email is personal and professional for optimum results.
3. Use a leave behind. A leave behind is a physical item that is left for the customer. This can be a business card, flyer, or even a piece of candy! Make sure that this item contains information about the order and asks for a review. 
4. Add a link to Google reviews on your website. This is another simple way to increase your reviews. 
5. Add CTA (call to actions) on your website. This can be a pop-up that asks how the customer is enjoying your product or service with a link to leave a review. 

Monitoring Google Reviews

Customers take negative reviews seriously but will be suspicious of only positive reviews. Consumers tend to think negative reviews have more credibility and will think them more persuasive than positive reviews. This is why it is vital to respond to reviews and address concerns, monitor your reviews, and present a helpful brand voice. 

To monitor your reviews, you can start by signing up for Google alerts. Google Alerts will monitor keywords (like your brand name or a product or service that you offer) and anytime those keywords are mentioned, you will get an email notification. There are many online services that will also monitor your online reviews and put them into an easily managed dashboard. 

Now, what happens when you cross a negative review? It is imperative that you respond to the review. Most businesses are so focused on generating reviews that they forget the importance of responding to them. The simple act of responding to a negative review shows a lot about your brand. 

What are the best practices of responding to reviews? 

• Add the practice of manually responding to reviews into your daily schedule. 
• Design your responses in a way that acknowledges the concern and address how you plan to fix it. 
• Encourage the reviewer to reach out to your team directly to resolve the issue.
• Developing canned responses will enable you to scale this process in the future. 

Schedule a meeting with one of our specialists to find out more!