A home care agency website welcomes new potential clients and referral sources and explains how your business can help them. It also provides a place for job seekers to learn more about your company’s career opportunities. The goal of a website is to entice people to take action — fill out an application or contact form, download a flyer, click to call and inquire, etc. So, an important facet of a website is how well users are engaging with its content. Are people staying to read about your services and clicking the contact button? Are they lingering on a blog post that is of particular interest to them and then clicking through to read more? Or do they leave the website quickly without engaging with it?
Those who leave the website quickly without engaging with it make up your bounce rate. Reducing bounce rate for your site is key to getting more quality leads.
Bounce Rate Highs and Lows
While your bounce rate can’t totally be eliminated, there are ways to lower it. But first, it’s important to understand the difference between a high and low bounce rate.
A high bounce rate is one where a visitor spends very little time on your website. For example, they visit one page of your site and then leave — no clicks, no calls, no form submissions, no downloads, etc. A low bounce rate, on the other hand, means that users are spending time engaging with your site’s content. They are clicking links, filling out forms, viewing multiple pages, downloading available PDFs, and contacting you.
A bounce rate of around 56%-70% is considered high, particularly if few leads are being generated. Between 26%-40% is usually an ideal bounce rate. It shows that people are engaging with your content and taking actions on your site.
What Causes a High Bounce Rate?
A high bounce rate can be caused by a number of factors, including:
- Low-quality content that doesn’t resonate with your intended audience
- A site that isn’t easy to use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets
- Poor site usability
- Lack of calls-to-action
- Slow loading speeds
- Annoying pop-ups
- Unnecessary or duplicative plug-ins
- Unoptimized or misleading title tags and meta descriptions
- Improperly implemented Google Analytics setup
- Spam bots
Any of these things, or a combination of them, can greatly impact your bounce rate. So how do you fix them?
- Review pages that have a high exit rate. This information available in your Google Analytics dashboard will show you where people tend to abandon your website and can help you begin to develop a plan of attack.
- Make sure your website is optimized for mobile users. According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cellphone, which means that a vast amount of people access the internet via a mobile device each day. When a website is not mobile optimized, it can be extremely hard to read and navigate on a smartphone or tablet, making people exit your site quickly.
- Target high-value traffic keywords. Keywords are an important part of how users find your website. For example, if people are searching for “home care in Atlanta” and you offer home care services in that area, that keyword phrase should show up on your website. If visitors land on your website following a query search from a web browser, it is important that your content affirms that they are in the right place by offering them the information for which they were searching. Using the right keywords helps you attract visitors who are likely going to stay on your page longer and take some sort of action.
- Include clear, well-placed CTAs (calls to action). Well-written, optimized content on your pages is vital. But once you have that, you then need to think about the kind of action you want visitors to take. Do you want them to call you to inquire about your home care services? Fill out a contact form so that you can capture their email information for targeted marketing campaigns? Well-placed CTAs can be used to spark visitors into taking an action that will help convert them into a lead. Make your CTAs easy to locate and place them where a visitor might naturally choose to take action, like at the end of a blog post.
- Make your site user-friendly. Attention spans are not long these days, which means you only have a few seconds to make a good impression with your website. No one is going to spend time figuring out how to navigate through a clunky, confusing site, which is why making your site user-friendly is crucial. Make text organized and readable. Use an easy-to-navigate layout that allows for quick navigation on all platforms and browsers. And avoid too many pop-ups or ads that distract from your content.
- Keep your website updated and secure. To help avoid attacks by spam bots or hackers, which can drive up your bounce rate, make sure your website is reviewed at least monthly for security updates that need to be applied. (And don’t forget to back up your website regularly as well for added protection.) If you are seeing a lot of spam hitting your site from a particular foreign country, you might also consider using a service such as Wordfence or Akamai to block visits to your site from that country.
Attracting visitors to your agency’s website is just the first step in an online marketing campaign. Ensuring they engage with your content is an ongoing process that involves not only high-quality content, but also close evaluation to ensure you’re attracting the right people and converting them into leads. While digging into background statistics such as bounce rate can feel daunting, the benefits of improving user experience and lead generation are well worth the effort.