As a website owner, the last thing you want is to have the people you work hard to get to your website leave so quickly – this action is known as bounce rate. This is described as the percentage of visitors who visit your site but left without visiting other pages or left without clicking anything. A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you have content that can be consumed on a single page or a single-page website.
However, if the success of your business depends on people visiting your website and taking more steps like filling out a contact form or placing an order, a high bounce rate will be harmful to your business and website. In this post, we will discuss some of the reasons your website may have a high bounce rate.
1. Slow Loading Times
Website speed is part of Google’s ranking algorithm because they want to promote content that offers a positive experience for users, and the platform recognizes that a website with slow loading times can provide a miserable experience. If your site takes longer than a few seconds to load, the chances that your visitors may get fed up and leave is very high.
Fixing the speed of a website is a constant journey for webmasters and most SEO professionals, but the benefit is that with every incremental fix, you will see a boost in speed. You can review your website speed by using tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights. These tools will offer recommendations specific to your website, such as reducing third-party scripts, compressing your images, and leveraging browser caching.
2. Too Many Pop-ups and Ads
According to statistics, about 68 percent of website visitors say they’d block a website from search if it has too many pop-ups. In a survey, the ad technique also has a 73 percent disapproval rating. Although other types of ads don’t quite annoy visitors, people don’t want to hang out on websites that bombard them with ads. That doesn’t mean you can’t have ads on your website at all.
Joel House Search Media highlights that about 80 percent of people say that ads are not bad to have, but they feel the ones that distract them from what they are really looking for is an issue. If you are going to advertise on your site, do A/B testing to figure out the right designs that make it easier to use ads without driving people away.
3. Bad Web Design
A website with poor and outdated web design can leave a bad mark on the mind of your visitors. It distracts them, and this makes your visitor figure they are better off looking for information, product, or assistance elsewhere. Moreover, your site could look good and still have design issues. For instance, your visitors could find it challenging to navigate and get what they are looking for.
Your visitors are more likely to give up and look somewhere else for what they need. If you haven’t done a site redesign in a while, now is the time to do so. Make sure your web design is attractive yet simple to use, as this will make them engaged on your site. Ugly and outdated web design or layout incites high bounce rates.
4. Bad Link from Another Site
You could be doing everything right on your end to achieve a low or normal bounce rate, and still have a high bounce rate as the result of the referral traffic. The anchor and context for the link to your website could be misleading, or a website referring could be sending unqualified visitors to your site.
Sometimes this could be as the result of sloppy copywriting. It could also be because the publisher or writer linked the wrong part of the content to your site. When this happens, reach out to the author of the article or the webmaster if he/she can’t update post-publish. Politely ask them to update the context or remove the link to your site.
5. The Page isn’t mobile-friendly
People spend an average of 5hrs on their mobile devices daily, and almost a third of all online shopping is done on mobile. Stats show that bounce rates are 40 percent higher on a mobile device than on desktop – sites that haven’t been optimized for mobile don’t look good or load fast on mobile devices. And this leads to a high bounce rate.
So, you should make sure your site is mobile-friendly and has a fast loading speed on mobile devices, and the user interface is better as well. You can also identify non-mobile friendly web pages at large by using the Google Test My Site tool.
6. Misleading Page Summaries and Titles
If the content of your page doesn’t accurately summarize your meta description and title tag, your visitor will bounce back the instant they enter your website. Whether you were trying to manipulate the system by optimizing for keyword clickbait (which is very bad) or it was an innocent mistake, this is simple enough to fix.
You can either rewrite the content to tackle the search queries you require to attract your visitors or adjust the meta description and title tag and review the content of your page accordingly.
7. Quality of Contents
Whether its dues to bad formatting, spelling errors, or because the information is not useful, if the people landing on your website simply don’t find useful content, they have no reason to stick around. Your visitors know that if your website doesn’t deliver, a lot of other quality websites that will. Moreover, this will not only drive visitors away, but it can also hurt your business credibility.
Make sure you invest your time in developing high-quality content that offers something your visitors can’t find anywhere else and make them want to come back for more. Although this can be challenging to do, it can make a significant difference in not just reducing your website bounce rates, but also ensuring you build a strong relationship with your audience.
About The Author:
Joel House is a founder of Joel House Search Media which is the best SEO Company in Brisbane. His Passion towards Organic SEO and Google Adwords makes him more special. He ensures one thing above all is to keep quality. It will all ensure that you, the client, get the best ROI and SEO.
