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5 Tips to Improve the Bounce Rate of Your Real Estate Website

September 16 2014

bouncerate lwolfRecently, I had one of our clients ask how they could reduce the bounce rate on their website. This is something that I've seen more people become interested in as they start to familiarize themselves with the features of Google Analytics.

What exactly is "bounce rate"?

Bounce rate measures the percentage of people who have visited only one page on your website. While the average website has approximately a 50% bounce rate, it's fair to say that you want your website to have as low of a bounce rate as possible, because this means that more people are viewing multiple pages in one session.

What affects bounce rate?

Before taking a look at how you can improve your bounce rate, there are a few areas that you may want to consider.

  • How are people getting to your website? If you find that a lot of your traffic is from social media, your average bounce rate will be higher – this is typical behavior for traffic from social media. When it comes to social media, you should typically be more concerned with the time spent on your website, not the bounce rate. Look at the bounce rate of other traffic sources (such as direct traffic or search engine traffic) when determining if you are happy with your bounce rate.
  • What pages are people entering your website on? If these pages have high bounce rates, take a look at how users are directed to additional pages on your website. (Are there links within your content, or are there any calls to action?) Alternately, you may find that the content on these pages aren't related to the title of the page or the search terms that brought users to this page. It could be as simple as users being unable to find the information they are looking for easily, or users not knowing what to do next.
  • Are the people visiting your website the ones that you want visiting? Are the users visiting your website actually looking to buy or sell their home? Are they in your geographical area? If you find that the users visiting your site aren't actually in your target market, you may want to consider trying a different approach to reaching your specific audience.
  • How easy is it for users to find information on your website? If your website looks over complicated or if you have unclear navigation, users may simply be unable to find what they want to see next.

What can I do to improve my bounce rate?

Once you've taken a more in-depth look at how users are getting your website, what page they are landing on, and whether they are the correct audience, there are a few things that you can do to improve your bounce rate.

  • Redesign. It may be a full webpage redesign to make your website more user friendly and easier to navigate, or it may be redesigning the content on a specific landing page to make it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. The key here is to make it easy for users to find what they are looking for.
  • Make sure that keywords, advertisements and any links you use to direct traffic to a page are reflective of the actual page content. Whether it means tweaking your content, or tweaking your keywords and advertisements, users who visit a page finding the content they expect to find will be more likely to look at additional pages on your website.
  • Provide clear calls to action. Don't leave the user with any confusion on what the next steps should be – prompt users to do something (whether it's to go to a specific custom search definition, sign up for your Home Hunter tool, or contact you).
  • Make sure your website navigation is clear. Organizing your navigation in a user-friendly way can help related content more easily. Users often leave a website if they can't find what they are looking for.
  • Rewrite your content so it's very easy to read. You want your content to be both easily understandable by your target market, as well as actually being easy to read. Your web designer will have set up specific styles to make your text as readable as possible – allow the styling that your web designer created when designing your website to be used when displaying your text, instead of changing the colour and font used when you are writing your text in your web manager.
When working towards improving your bounce rate, don't get discouraged if you don't see changes immediately. If you make a change, give it some time for enough data to be collected before deciding whether or not your change worked. By understanding a little bit more about why your bounce rate may be high in the first place, you'll have a better idea of where to start when making changes to improve it.
 
To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.