If you’ve just read “The true definition of bounce rate, why we need to demystify it”, welcome!
If unfortunately not, we advise you to read it before this one 🤓. There you’ll see why we say “rightly” in our question.
Why would you want to optimize your bounce rate if you know full well that it’s not counted in the Google algorithm? Because if your aim is to increase the number of interactions on certain pages of your site, your bounce rate needs to drop.
What can you do? By optimizing these pages! But the primary objective is not to “lower the bounce rate”.
What parameters should you check when optimizing your bounce rate?
POV: You want to optimize one of your website pages*, or even your homepage, but you don’t know where to start.
Let’s recall the objective here!
Increase the number of interactions on your pages in order to :
- keep your visitors coming back for longer,
- gain in number of pages/session,
- reduce the bounce rate.
*Distinguishable from a “landing page”, which is designed solely to acquire a new prospect or customer (via a form).
There are several questions to ask yourself ❓
On my page :
- Do I have enough links within my text that redirect to other pages on my site? This is called internal linking.
- Do I have enough CTAs* on my page? *Call To Action, in other words, call button
- Is the waterline at the top of my page in a position that prevents me from seeing the rest of the content?
- Do I have a good hierarchy of titles, and therefore fonts, on my page? The aim here is to ensure that the visitor’s eye doesn’t get lost in reading the content.
Do I have enough colored dots? enough explanatory images? The aim here is to entertain the visitor, to avoid lack of understanding or boredom.
You’d say, but then, after optimizing my page(s):
How do I know if the settings I’ve just modified are really optimized?
How can you be sure that, once modified, these parameters are optimized?
Start by having your page(s) tested by someone who:
- Has no prior knowledge of page content
- Don’t work in Marketing/Webdesign/etc. [Eeh yes, otherwise we know each other, the opinion will be biased 🙃]
- Bonus: doesn’t know your company’s pitch
And as with any test, you must not interfere in any way. In other words, let the tester browse the page without any intervention on your part.
And don’t forget to :
- time your tester on the page, and generally on the site;
- count the number of clicks on the page, if any;
- count the number of pages he’s been on.
Do this with 3 to 5 people, setting yourself targets for average time on page, clicks or number of pages.
The best would be to have 3 people on the optimized page, and 3 people on the non-optimized page. Then compare the results, and learn from each return.
To go even further,
There’s a Google extension called the Lighthouse.
→ Download the Lighthouse extension
This extension enables a number of things, but here we’re going to focus on the next score: “Accessibility”.
This score is out of 100 and is displayed after launching the extension from a site page.
It calculates whether or not some of Google’s preferred accessibility/visibility criteria are met. And if not, it tells you exactly what’s wrong.
An example:
Here we see that the score is 96, but that Google also specifies a visibility improvement just below that.
“Background and foreground colors do not have a sufficient contrast ratio” 🟡⚪ In other words, the color contrast of the CTA taken in screenshot just below is not sufficient. The white color of the text on the orange-yellow CTA is not sufficiently visible.
It’s an improvement that may seem small at first, but it could save you visitors. After all, ” more than half of all visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your company’s website ” (source: Time.com). So the first 15 seconds are the most important [I’d say the first 7 to be precise]. In 15 seconds [7 trust me] the main subject must be clearly understood and make people want to stay for its form.
We sometimes forget that 1.4% of French people have a vision problem (excluding the blind), 8% are color-blind, and 76% wear glasses.
Clear content and good formatting are an asset for :
- keep visitors coming back for longer,
- explain the chronology of the page,
- make you want to click in the right places,
- and, above all, to be understood.
Read also:
SEO: which tool to use when you don’t know how to optimize your site?
Our 4 tips for optimizing your bounce rate
- Clear content 🔍 (title hierarchy)
- In its good formatting 💪 (precise colors and typography, explanatory images, waterline, etc.).
- With a reasoned and sufficient number of calls to action 🚀 (CTA, internal site links, form etc.).
- Proven and approved by testers ✅ (Google’s Lighthouse, too)
Here’s how to optimize your bounce rate, and rightly so, through the content of your pages.
