As a coach, you probably already know that you need a strong online presence to reach and interact with your target audience.
Did you know there’s a number that can tell you how well your website keeps people interested and brings them back?
This number is called “bounce rate.”
What is bounce rate? How does a good bounce rate look like? And, more importantly, how can you get people to stay on your website longer so your bounce rate is lower? In this complete guide, we’ll answer all of these questions.
This post will teach you how to make your website perform better and connect with your audience more effectively, whether you’re just starting out with a website for your coaching business or you already have a website and want to reach more people.
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is a measurement of how many people go to a website but only look at one page before leaving.
It’s a great way to measure how well a website keeps people interested and coming back. After all, if a user only looks at one page before leaving, it’s likely that they didn’t find what they were looking for on the site.
The bounce rate of a website is determined by dividing the number of sessions where only one page was looked at by the total number of sessions.
If a website gets 100 visitors per month and 80 of them only look at one page, the website’s bounce rate is 80%. This means that 80% of the people who went to the site didn’t stay to look at more pages, which suggests they weren’t interested in the content on the site.
Keep in mind that bounce rate is just one of many factors that affect the overall success of a website. Still, it can be a good thing to keep an eye on and try to improve because it can show how well a site attracts and keeps visitors.
What’s a good “bounce rate”?
There’s no one standard for what makes a bounce rate “good.”
Bounce rates can be very different depending on the type of website and its goals. But there are a few broad standards that can be used as approximations.
Most websites have between 40 and 55% bounce rate.
Bounce rates are likely to be a little bit higher on some sites. Content-heavy sites like blogs tend to have a higher bounce rate because some users may only want to read one post before leaving the site.
But an e-commerce site may have a lower bounce rate because shoppers are more likely to click through to more pages.
Also, keep in mind that the definition of a “good” bounce rate can change depending on things like how the website is designed, how relevant the content is, how the user experiences the website, and even the time of year.
So, when you’re making your coaching website, you need to think about more than just the norm in the industry.
A good bounce rate, in my opinion, is simply one that’s better than what you have now. This means that it’s usually not helpful to compare your site’s bounce rate to others’. Instead, you should focus on lowering your own bounce rate.
When does a high bounce rate become a problem?
This may sound like a no-brainer, but having a high bounce rate can cause a few problems.
It hurts the website’s goals and success measures.
People who only look at one page of your website before leaving can mean you have low conversion rates and overall website engagement.
It goes without saying that this could make it hard to get leads, build an email list, and set up consults through your website.
It means people are less interested in and satisfied with your site.
It can hurt the credibility of your site and make it harder to get new clients.
In short, a high bounce rate can have a domino effect on the success and performance of your coaching website as a whole. That’s why it’s important to keep track of and lower your website’s bounce rate if you want your online presence to help your business.
What factors contribute to a higher bounce rate?
There are a few things that can make people leave your coaching website quickly. Just a few of the most common ones are:
- Bad website design and functionality: An out-of-date or ugly design can turn people off and make it hard for them to find what they need. Because of this, bounce rates and user engagement may go down.
- Slow loading times: If it takes too long to load, people are likely to leave. A website might not do as well if it loads slowly.
- Lack of relevance to visitor needs expectations: People will probably leave your website right away if it doesn’t have the tools or information they need. That can make people leave your site faster, which can make your bounce rate go up.
- Bad user experience: A website that is hard to use or doesn’t make sense to its visitors will likely lead to a bad user experience and a quick bounce. It doesn’t matter how pretty your site is if people can’t find what they need there.
You can improve your website’s performance, engagement, and user experience by figuring out why people leave your site quickly and fixing those problems.
Best Practices for Reducing Bounce Rate
There are a few important things you can do to lower your website’s bounce rate and make it work better:
- Work on your website’s design and functionality: To get more people to stay on it and reduce the number of people who leave right away, make sure the site design is quality. Consider hiring a web designer like me to make sure your website looks great, is easy to use, and gives visitors a great experience.
- Optimize website loading times: If it takes too long to load, people will leave. Some ways to reach this goal are to compress images to make them smaller and use as few plugins and scripts as possible.
- Make sure your content is useful and interesting to your audience: People will stay on your site if they can find what they want there. If you want people to stay on your site longer and have lower bounce rates, you should think about putting new content on it regularly.
- Improve the user experience: A good user experience can make a big difference in how many people leave your site and how many stay on it. You can use heat mapping and user testing to find out where your coaching website can be improved.
- Test and keep track of your website’s performance: Testing and keeping track of your website’s performance on a regular basis can help you find places to improve and make changes to lower bounce rates.
- Use analytics tools to find areas for improvement: A key part of making your website better is using analytics to find problem areas. If you want to improve your website’s performance and lower bounce rates, you might want to think about reviewing your site’s analytics often and taking user feedback into account.
- Implement conversion rate optimization strategies: Using conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies to get more site visitors to do what you want them to do, such as make a purchase or sign up for your email list, is a great way to decrease bounce rate.
You can use these methods to lower your website’s “bounce rate,” improve its performance, and get your audience more involved.
Take small steps to lower your bounce rate
You now know what bounce rate is (the percentage of visitors to your website who leave after only viewing one page), why it’s important to track (so you know where to improve your site and increase conversions!), and what you can do to lower it.
This may seem like a lot of information, but remember that you don’t have to do all of these things at once.
This month, just think about one thing. The next month, one more, and so on. The point of this post isn’t to give you a ton of information, but rather to give you a few things you can do to lower your bounce rates.
I hope that helps,
Jennie
