Do you know your website’s bounce rate?

For that matter, do you even know what a bounce rate is?

For the small business owners that are too busy digging themselves out of paperwork to stay up to date on this sort of jargon, let us explain: your site’s bounce rate is the amount of visitors to your page that leave the website without visiting any other pages on the site. It typically means that your landing page is not very strong or that your SEO if off.

Luckily, there is quite a bit you can do to make sure your bounce rate stays low. Some of you may already be doing these things and likely have a current low bounce rate. However, here are some tips for those of you that may be struggling.

Make Sure Your landing Page is Easy to Read and Navigate. If your landing page is an eyesore, that’s an automatic strike against you. Loud colors or excessive bells and whistles can turn some readers off right away. Make sure your page is easy for even the slowest of users to navigate. Simple colors and design often work best for landing pages.

Improve Your Loading Times.  Most people online are incredibly impatient. If they have to wait for your page to load for more than five seconds, they will probably leave and go elsewhere, Make sure you don’t fall victim to this by removing unnecessary plug-ins and videos. If you are still having problems, contact your web designer for help.

Keep keywords and SEO strong.  Always be sure that you are reinforcing your keywords in your content. If you put it in your metadata and not in your copy, your readers are going to leave promptly. Also, it is not cool to use your business name as a central keyword. Keep it centered on the topic at hand, not you.

Watch it with all the external links.  While it’s certainly admirable to place an external link to a page that you got some of your information from, you need to be clever and strategic with where you place them, Placing them close to the beginning may lead some to click the link and never return to your page. Try placing external links near the bottom of the page to prevent this.

What other tactics are your small business using to make sure your bounce rate remains low?