Ways to Reduce Your Financial Advisor Website Homepage Bounce Rate

Imagine that you own a store, and you’ve invested time and money to get customers in the door. And that works — they do come in the door, but then they immediately walk back out. That’s essentially what it means when a visitor “bounces” off your financial advisor website. 

More specifically, visitors clicked a link to get to your website and when they arrived, they did not interact at all (i.e., click a link, fill out a form, watch a video, etc.) and then left the site altogether. This can happen for many reasons, some of which aren’t bad. 

For example, if someone was looking for a quick answer to a question, they may have searched for it, found it on your financial advisor website, and then moved on. While they didn’t stick around and engage, your site still provided the information they were seeking. And while this does happen, if your financial advisor website is seeing high bounce rates overall, there is likely a bigger problem.

Use this guide to make your website more credible!

How Bounce Rate is Calculated

Bounce rate is calculated by taking the total number of sessions where visitors only clicked a single page by the number of total sessions on your financial advisor website over a specific time period. For example, if your site had 250 total website visits, and 75 of those visits resulted in single page sessions (bounces), then your bounce rate for that period of time is 30%. 

This brings up an important question: What is considered a “good” bounce rate? According to HubSpot, the average bounce rate is anywhere from 26% to 70% with the optimal range being between 26% and 40%. You can monitor the bounce rate for your financial advisor website through Google Analytics, as well as other website metric platforms. 

Note: Like all statistics, bounce rate can be misleading if not used in the right context. Which is why it’s helpful to not only look at bounce rate, but also other metrics such as time on page and scroll depth (how far down the page a visitor scrolled). While still not perfect, reviewing these measurements in conjunction with bounce rate can help you glean a better understanding of your financial advisor website’s bounce rate. 

For better context, here’s a scenario where looking at multiple metrics can help interpret bounce rate for a specific page on your site:

XYZwealthmanagement.com is seeing high bounce rates (80%) and they’re concerned about the overall performance of their site. However, they also notice that the average time on page is 54 seconds and scroll depth is 60%. Those numbers tell a different story, in that while people aren’t technically “interacting” with their site, they are clearly staying long enough to read content on the site. 

As such, the bounce rate isn’t as concerning as originally thought. However, this does bring up some other tweaks that could be made on the page to increase engagement and decrease bounce rate. These aspects are what make getting professional help with digital marketing for financial advisors so vitally important.

Tips for Keeping Bounce Rate Low

Once you’ve established how to measure and monitor your financial advisor website’s bounce rate, you can dig into ways to improve it. Like in the scenario above, a high bounce rate isn’t inherently bad, but it could mean there are some ways to increase visitor engagement and conversions such as signing up for an email distribution list or filling out a contact form. 

Here are some tactics proven to decrease financial advisor website bounce rates:

Optimize Load Time

Your website visitors expect speed. If they have to wait for your page to fully load, they’re likely to bounce right off your site before they even get a look at your content. This is especially true of mobile sites. If your site is bogged down with too-large files, unnecessary pop-ups, or animations, you could be creating an undesirable user experience that will result in a higher bounce rate. 

Mobile Responsive/Mobile First

As mentioned above, mobile users expect a clean and fast experience on your financial advisor website. This practice is known as mobile responsive or mobile-first design. Mobile responsive means that your financial advisor website was designed in a way to respond optimally on mobile devices, especially accounting for device screen sizes and how users interact overall with your site on mobile devices. A mobile-first design takes it a step further and builds a website with elements that are considering all aspects of how it performs on a mobile device before its performance on a desktop computer. This practice is becoming increasingly popular as mobile devices become the primary source of internet searches.

Optimize Site Structure 

While this overlaps with some aspects of increasing load time speeds, there are other aspects of your financial advisor website structure that can be optimized to increase engagement and decrease bounce rate. Your financial advisor website should be organized and structured in a way that makes it as easy as possible for users to navigate. That means a clean space with no clutter and concise text that doesn’t overwhelm the page. There should also be at least one clear call to action (CTA) for users to engage if they choose. 

Find the Source of the Bounces

If the bounces are coming from Google searches or even social media, the problem could be misleading content or inaccurate keyword use. In short, this could mean a simple link fix or trigger an overhaul of your financial advisor website’s SEO strategy – both of which could help increase engagement and decrease your financial advisor website bounce rate. 

Your competition is only growing! Financial Advisors need SEO effective websites now, and moving forward.

If you are curious about how you can begin reducing your bounce rate and improving your website with modern digital marketing strategies, reach out to set-up a call with Paladin Digital Marketing. We’d love to take a look at your marketing efforts to see how we can help.