8 Quick Squarespace Website Changes That Improve Your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the rate of people who visit your website’s home page (or another page) and immediately leave your website without visiting any other pages (essentially bouncing!)
As a Squarespace SEO expert, the bounce rate of my website is something I review for my clients as well as something I keep in mind while designing websites.
How do you figure out what yours is?
You can find your bounce rate via Google Analytics to track your bounce rate over time.
The lower your bounce rate, the better, because people are spending more time on your website and are more likely to book with you.
Today, I’m covering how to improve (lower) your bounce rate and keep visitors on your website.
1. Make sure your website is professional with high-quality photos
If you visited a website and the first thing you saw were low-quality, pixelated photos, would you stay on the website and consider booking with the company?
Of course not.
For this reason, investing in high-quality photos for your website that fit your theme is essential to making a great first impression on visitors and keeping them on your website.
2. Use lots of white space and not overwhelming or dark colors as backgrounds
Visitors appreciate a design that is clean, easy-to-read, and not overly condensed.
For this reason, make sure there is ample white space between lines of text and photos on your site, and be sure to avoid overwhelming colors (like bright orange or yellow) or dark colors as backgrounds.
Overwhelming or dark colors not only give your website a vibe that may not fit your audience’s tastes, but can make the text on your website hard to read – essentially eliminating the value of all the work you put into writing it!
As a Squarespace website designer, I love using contrasting colors and plain white backgrounds on my clients’ sites to give them a clean look that invites clients in – and to stay.
3. Make sure your content is easy to read
Though fancy script/display fonts look fun and enticing, loading your website’s pages with them can actually do more harm than good.
It’s totally fine to use them here and there to add a pop of personality for a few words or a phrase you want to highlight, but using them too often or for long passages of text makes your content difficult to read and will frustrate visitors.
In addition, making use of organizational formatting like headlines and bullets helps visitors find exactly what they’re looking for quickly, and organizes your text in a way that is easy for readers to digest.
You never want to make your visitors work to read or understand your content – so anything you can do to make it easier for them is a great way to improve bounce rate!
4. Make your navigation simple, straightforward, and easy to understand
One of the best ways to keep visitors exploring the various pages on your website is to keep your navigation simple and easy.
If visitors don’t know where to click next, they’ll often click the “exit” button – so make sure your navigation menus clearly display everything they may need, from contact pages to info about your company.
Including both a header and footer menu is a great way to ensure that no matter where they are on any given page, there is a new link nearby that will catch their eye!
Keep page titles simple - someone shouldn’t have to guess what’s on the other side of a link.
For example, if I wanted to link my SEO course in the main navigation, I wouldn’t just name it “SEO Strategy Simplified.”
From an outsider’s perspective, it could be the name of my 1:1 program, a course or a webinar. You’d have no idea.
Instead, I would name it “SEO Course” - much more simple and straightforward.
I see this mistake many times with online coaches who link their program names in the top navigation, so it’s definitely worth mentioning!
5. Have a strong CTA
A CTA, or call-to-action, is something that tells your visitor what to do next.
This can be anything from signing up for your email list to booking a discovery call.
Your CTA shouldn’t just tell them what to do, though – it should convince them to do it through engaging language and the clear benefits of doing so.
Having a CTA is a great way to make sure that after your visitor digests all the great information on your site, they don’t just leave your website and forget.
Instead, they take one last step that will keep you connected in the future.
For more information on creating a strong CTA, check out this post here.
6. Make sure your content speaks to the people you want to attract.
You’ve probably heard the saying before that “If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.”
This is especially true when it comes to the copy on your business website!
Make sure your content is tailored to speak directly to whomever it is you want to attract (AKA your ideal audience.)
You can tailor your content through language and word choice, colors, photos, and more. Making use of all these aspects of your content is a great way to engage your ideal client and keep them on your page.
7. Update your meta descriptions to be clear and concise.
As a Squarespace website designer, one thing I HATE to see are meta descriptions that 1) aren’t clear, or 2) are too long to fit in the search engine snippet.
Meta descriptions are essential for letting people scanning Google search results know exactly what any given page on your website offers, so making sure your descriptions are clear, accurate, and concise makes browsers less likely to mistakenly click on your content and then click away - affecting your bounce rate.
8. Speed up your website by optimizing your images.
One thing that website browsers find really frustrating is when your website takes too long to load - and they often simply exit out and pick another website in this case.
One way to make sure this doesn’t happen to you is to speed up your website by optimizing your images. (You can find out here!)
The faster your website loads, the less likely visitors are to click away from it - lowering your bounce rate.
Hopefully you’ve gained a ton of insight from this post letting you know exactly how you can improve your bounce rate and keep the visitors that find your website ON your website for as long as possible.
If you’re looking for a Squarespace website designer or SEO strategist that can help you with all of these issues your website may currently be facing, look no further! You can check out my services below. With my 2 years of professional experience working in the SEO industry, I place a huge focus on correctly optimizing websites for maximum visibility in Google.
Looking for more Squarespace SEO tips? Check out these blog posts: