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Posted by Maulik Patel
February 13, 2017
Are you tensed up with your website’s dreaded high bounce rates?
But before that, What’s actually Bounce Rate?
In simple terms, Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors that bounce back (leave your website) to the referring website or the search results after viewing only the page they entered on your website.
The visitor lands on your website. Browses through your website and leaves. No clicks, no conversions. It’s possible that he didn’t find what he was looking for or your web page didn’t load quickly or properly or your web page was too difficult for him to use. Now what boils down is the fact that you’re not able to retain your website’s visitors. The key point is to make sure that once the visitor lands on a web page, he’s drawn to visit even more pages on your website.
According to a web analytic company Kissmetrics, an average bounce rate for a website is 40.5%. But it differs for various industries – content sites get 40-6 bounces, retail sites get 20-40%, services sites get 10-30% and the most bounces come from the first-time visitors.
A high bounce rate says your website attracts a large number of visitors who are not your prospects or what you are selling is not relevant to them. Through monitoring the bounce rates, you should try to understand the users’ behavior and find out solutions to decrease the bounce rates and boost conversions.
While bounce rates are disappointing, they’re also an indicator that your website needs to be fixed up.
Before stepping ahead, simply take a moment to think about the goals for your website and checkout whether having a high bounce rate on your site is really a bad thing. There are some websites where the goal is to take a call to action, not to have large number of visitors browse endlessly through the website content.
If your website goal only requires people to visit one page on your website, then there’s no need to worry about bounce rate. In such case, your website goals will be accomplished if the number of people leaving your website after viewing your website’s landing page is high.
7 Reasons Your Website Can Have A High Bounce Rate
Let’s checkout some common reasons your website can face high bounce rates :
If your website takes longer than a few seconds to load, the visitors are more likely to leave your website. It’s long time, Google has indicated that the site speed is a crucial factor included in the ranking algorithm, so focus on it. Google favors the websites that provide a positive user experience, and recognize the slow sites providing a poor experience for users. To review the page speed of your web pages, you can use tools like Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix.
These tools offer you the recommendations specific to your website such as leveraging browser caching, compressing the images and reducing the scripts.
You need to ask yourself if the content of your web page is accurately summarized by appropriate meta description and title tag. If not, visitors may not find the thing they’re looking for and bounce back.
If you see an exceptionally high bounce rate; that the visitors are not spending more than a few seconds on the page, there are chances that your web page is not loading properly, returning a 404 or it’s a blank page.
If you’re an affiliate, the whole point of your page may be to deliberately send people away from your website to the merchant’s site. In such case, if the page has a higher bounce rate you’re on the right track.
Let’s face the truth, visitors may be bouncing from your website because your content is not relevant and useful to visitors. Now, be honest and take a look at your web pages and have your most judgmental and honest colleague or friend review it. The ideal person for this job is the one who either has a background in copy-writing content marketing, or they fall into your target audience.
In case your website’s content is poorly written or simply isn’t something your audience cares about, consider hiring a copywriter or content strategist who can help you revamp your ideas into powerful content that converts.
Are you attacking the visitors with pop ups, ads or email subscribe buttons? Having too many CTA features like these may seem irresistible to the marketers, but can make the visitors run away from your website.
Is your website easy to navigate? No? Your visitors may be looking to explore more but your website is missing a search box or the menu items on the mobile devices.
It all begins with Google Analytic – Signing into your website’s Google Analytic profile, you are greeted with an average bounce rate. There are chances that you haven’t properly implemented Google Analytic and added the tracking codes to all the pages on your site.
What should we check in order to provide the best user experience? Here are some great ways on how to reduce the bounce rates:
Keyword optimization plays a vital role in directing users to your website. But you should make sure that you’re not attracting the wrong audience. Determine your target audience, be specific who your visitors should be and deliver the content that speaks to their needs and interests. If you notice a higher bounce rate, specifically on your landing pages or homepage, take a look at your keywords and make the required alterations.
Optimize your web pages’ meta descriptions for the search users. Meta descriptions are used to describe what a particular web page is about. These meta descriptions are used by the search engines to display a snippet of your web page, in order to help the users determine whether a particular search result is right for them, just by reading the description. If your web pages do not have appropriate meta descriptions, maybe the visitors didn’t think that the page was that important – but it is.
A website with right, fresh content always yields the best ROI. Powerful content may leave a good impression on your readers, but it may not solve their problems. On the contrary, the right content will not only wow them, but it’ll also give them actionable tips to implement and produce results for them.
We all know how important is site speed to users? The slower your landing pages load, the higher the bounce rates. Google is concerned about the site speed, if your website is consistently slow to load, there are chances your website slips in ranking. Eventually, this may destroy your business and discourage potential customers from buying from your site.
More than 50% of all the Internet users now use mobile devices to consume content. If your website isn’t still mobile-optimized, you’re begging for high bounce rates. Whether building a new website or updating an existing one, all the site owners now need to give priority to mobile in their checklists. There are more than billion websites available on the web and if your site is not easy to navigate on an iPhone or Android, your visitors(especially the first-time visitors) will leave.
High bounce rate is a signal that your website needs a serious redesigning and you need to revamp your marketing strategy. It may be a time-consuming process to implement all these changes and fixing up each and every issue, but it’s the best way to give your landing pages a better chance to convert the prospects into customers.
Hopefully, this post has helped you identify what’s causing high bounce rates for your website and how to fix it. If you’ve liked the post, do share it! If you’re planning how to reduce the bounce rates, share with us What has worked the best for you, and Which strategies you’re looking to try in future?
