If you own an insurance company with a website, you may be surprised to learn that you have a very limited time in which to make a favorable impression with website visitors. Online marketing for insurance agents takes into account the concept of “bounce rate”, or the percentage of visitors who leave your site after only one page view. There are several reasons why site visitors may not like your website. In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of those reasons, present ways to reduce your bounce rate, and offer tips to optimize your site, helping you to provide your visitors with the great first impression that can improve business opportunities for you and your team.
Bounce Rate: A Performance Metric That Matters
The goal of any online marketing campaign is to increase traffic to one’s company website. Insurance agencies are no different. Many companies struggle to increase website traffic or to get more leads. If this is the case for your business, it is possible that your bounce rate is higher than it should be. Typically, a high bounce rate suggests that the page site visitors land on doesn’t answer the questions they may have or provide relevant details needed for them to stick around and explore more of the site.
Bounce rate is one of many performance metrics that influence the rankings of a given website in search. Those sites with higher bounce rates do not rank as highly in search engine algorithms, potentially pushing those sites out of the coveted top slots on search results pages. Of course, this can negatively impact the number of visitors a given site receives as well as adversely affecting the conversion rate, or the percentage of people who become customers after visiting a company’s website. In online marketing for insurance agents, bounce rate is a performance metric that matters – without a favorable rate, you will face difficulties in growing your online business.
Factors Influencing Bounce Rate
Now that we’ve looked at the bounce rate and what that can mean for businesses, it can be useful to understand what some of the influencing factors are. In other words, what are some of the common reasons that people may leave a given website after a single page view? There are several reasons, including:
- Poor website design – Outdated features, inoperable functionality, broken links, and a cluttered look can spell disaster for bounce rates.
- Poor navigation – Related to overall site design, if site visitors cannot readily find their way around a site due to poor internal linking and breadcrumbs, they are likely to go elsewhere for their information.
- Slow page loads – This can be the “kiss of death” for site visitors. Why wait for a page to load when the competitor’s site loads instantly?
- Content that is difficult to read – The colors and fonts chosen to display text content can have a significant impact on the ability of site visitors to get the information they’re looking for.
- Overuse of ads – If your site uses ads, overwhelming site visitors with banners in every conceivable location is a recipe for disaster.
- Auto-playing video content – While video content is critical in the modern marketing landscape, the vast majority of website visitors do not like auto-playing videos. In fact, those are one of the leading causes of a high bounce rate.
Improving Your Site to Reduce Bounce Rate
In online marketing for insurance agents, your goal is to provide a rich user experience for website visitors. Reducing bounce rate is crucial in converting visitors into customers of your agency, and here are some tips for making subtle improvements that pay off in longer times on site and a lower bounce rate than ever before.
- Improve site content readability. Some tips here include breaking larger chunks of text into smaller paragraphs, bolding key concepts and terms, and using subheaders to highlight specific areas of interest.
- Work on page loading times. Your web team should do whatever they can to improve page loading speeds, a metric that not only influences bounce rate, but can harm search engine rankings over the long term if the load time is lengthy. Don’t make your visitors wait to get the details they need to become customers.
- Avoid popups and banner ads. Unless your site is ad-driven, popup features and banner ads do a lot to ruin the overall user experience. Eliminate them wherever possible from your site’s landing pages.
- Add landing pages. In a recent marketing study, sites with greater numbers of landing pages (40 or more) saw vastly improved conversion rates and a much lower bounce rate than sites with single or few landing pages.
With these cost-effective approaches, your agency’s website can gain more visitors, have visitors spend more time on site, and improve conversion rates. Online marketing is a complex area that requires diligence and the flexibility to make improvements as needed. With these tips, you’ll be well on your way to a lower bounce rate and more business!
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