Top 5 Ways to Get Visitors to Stay on Your Website

by | Apr 15, 2021 | Branding, Design, Marketing, SEO, Tips & Tricks

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If you’re a business owner with a website that is experiencing a high user bounce rate, then you’ve come to the right place. For those unfamiliar with the term, a bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that navigate away from a website after viewing a single page. The most common reasons for a website to have a high bounce rate include:

  • Visitors aren’t easily finding what they’re looking for
  • Visitors are unsatisfied with the user experience the website is providing
  • Visitors do not trust the quality of the brand or information being offered to them

This post covers the top 5 strategies for reducing a website’s bounce rate so that visitors stay on your site and turn into sales conversions.

Demonstrate Brand Cohesion

graphic of brand cohesion

One of the quickest ways to establish trust with a user is to show them the personality of your brand as soon as they land on your website. Customers are much more likely to trust a brand when they can identify with its values and notice consistency in its messaging. Effectively communicating these key elements of branding on a website requires brand cohesion. This is when a brand is unified in its appearance and messaging to tell a convincing story about itself.

The primary ways of displaying brand cohesion on a website include:

  • Color coordination
  • Copy that matches the personality of the brand
  • Imagery that communicates a particular lifestyle or emotion
  • Other key design elements such as fonts, icons, and structural organization

Below are some familiar brands that demonstrate fantastic brand cohesion on their websites.

Making sure that your brand’s personality and messaging are on full display helps build the initial trust needed to keep visitors interested and wanting to learn more about what your business has to offer.

Give Visitors What They Want, How They Want

This may sound like an easy one, but knowing what your customers are after isn’t always so simple, especially on the web. And even when you do know, you may not be delivering the information in a way that’s easy for them to understand or find.

If you think that this could be an issue happening on your site, take some time to review your content with fresh eyes and ask yourself these questions.

  • Is my site clearly communicating what my business does?
  • Am I answering questions that customers likely have about my business?
  • Is my site displaying too much unnecessary or irrelevant information?
  • Are my images showing what customers want to see while also looking professional?
  • How easy is it for visitors to find links to important pages?

Getting these questions answered, especially by a website professional, and making the proper adjustments can help reduce your website’s bounce rate significantly.

Use Clear Call-To-Actions

examples of call-to-action buttons

Call-to-actions (CTAs) are the main drivers of your website’s sales funnel. CTAs commonly come in the form of a button that uses strong declarative text. These buttons provide clear direction to visitors, allowing them to glance around the page and quickly find where to go next.

Without strong CTAs, visitors can get lost on a page and may not be able to figure out how to view certain information or complete important tasks. When this happens, the most common response is to leave the site in search of one that provides easy access to what they’re looking for. With the average attention span of visitors being just a few seconds, CTAs need to be easily visible to catch their attention.

Make Sure Your Site is Loading Quickly

a fast loading website

It might seem obvious that slow load speeds can have a devastating impact on a website’s bounce rate. But when is a website considered slow? To give you an idea, 1 in 4 visitors will abandon a website if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load. Google recommends that websites aim for load speeds under 2 seconds to maximally reduce bounce rate.

Hitting the 2-second mark is not always easy, especially if you have an asset-heavy website. If your website’s average load speed is hovering at 4 seconds and above, it’s time to look into what can be done to speed things up. Some of the first things to look at would be:

  • Reducing the file size of images on your site
  • Leverage caching using a plugin or your hosting company
  • Reduce the number of HTTP requests your site sends out
  • Make sure your PHP version is up to date

For a more in-depth look at how to address these issues, check out our post on how to improve your website’s load speed. Contacting your hosting company can also be a great start.

Give Visitors A Reason to Come Back

Now that we’ve covered the things you can do to stop visitors from preemptively leaving your website, let’s talk about some ways to keep them around a little longer. This is possibly the most difficult task for a website to accomplish, especially for small business owners.

There are 2 primary reasons users stay on a site after they’ve gotten what they initially come for. That is to either view additional content or make another purchase. And if you’re really good, it’s both.

Content

When it comes to creating content that keeps users on your site, think about what that content might look like. It could be a How-To guide that explains the various ways customers can use your products or services. It could be explainer articles that provide a more in-depth look at your business and what it has to offer. Or it could be lifestyle articles that promote the values of your brand. You can also diversify your content by making videos, infographics, or even a podcast.

Secondary Purchases

If you’re running an e-commerce website, a simple way to encourage additional purchases is to display several related products on the Thank You page after the initial checkout is complete. This gives you an opportunity to show customers something they may have missed while browsing your site. This is also a great opportunity to show accessory items that can be used with the customer’s initial purchase. Even if a customer decides not to purchase one of these products at this time, it may cause them to take note of it and come back later.

Down with High Bounce Rates

As you’ve learned, your website’s bounce rate hugely impacts its overall performance, and reducing it will greatly improve your website’s effectiveness as a sales tool for your business. Having a high bounce rate also negatively affects your site’s ranking on search engines, which hurts its ability to earn organic search traffic. So, getting your bounce rate down should be a top priority for any business owner.

Unsure of what your website’s bounce rate is? Ask us to help you figure it out!