Surely at some point you passed by a store, did some window-shopping, and left without entering. It’s the physical equivalent of bounces occurring on websites, which is when someone decides to leave immediately after visiting a page.
In this article, we’ll discuss what a high bounce rate means and try to understand the reasons behind it. Also, we’ll match the problem to the solution, offering you the blueprint on how to reduce your bounce rate and make your website as SEO-friendly as possible.
What Is the Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a website after viewing only one page. High bounce rates indicate that users land on a page and leave instead of interacting further by clicking on links or exploring additional content within the site.
Unlike exit rate, which is the number of users who left a site from a specific page (even if it wasn’t the initial page they visited), bounce rate is about single-page sessions.
While you need your bounce rate to be relatively low, you should expect a certain number of bounces even if you do most things right. What stands for a high bounce rate isn’t standard since it may depend on your industry, type of website, and business goals.
As a rule of thumb, bounce rates below 40% are good. Here’s an infographic that shows the average bounce rate across industries, helping you understand where your site stands in the market.
Why Should You Care About Bounce Rate?
Your website’s bounce rate is a key metric for analyzing how effective it is at engaging users.
A low bounce rate shows that users interact with the site and explore multiple pages. What’s more, marketers count on this indicator to gather insights into improving website performance, as well as creating more engaging content.
A high bounce rate is not just a sign your site doesn’t engage users enough. It further negatively impacts your site’s rankings. Search engines interpret high bounce rates as a sign that the page provides irrelevant or confusing content and will make it appear in lower positions.
Therefore, monitoring bounce rates is essential for improving user experience and increasing conversion rates.
6 Reasons Your Bounce Rate Is High and How to Fix It
Now that you know how important your bounce rate is, it’s time to look through the reasons behind a high bounce rate and explore the right ways to reduce it.
1. You Request Too Much Personal Data
When visitors have to fill out extensive forms with a lot of fields, they tend to abandon the process. This is a common reason for high bounce rates. Users hesitate to share sensitive information-especially when they feel they shouldn’t have to. Since they come across online scams daily, it’s only natural for them not to trust your website immediately.
So, before anything, you must build trust with your visitors. Instead of bombarding them with lengthy and data-heavy forms, prioritize essential information to help them complete the action required. Here’s how the number of fields added to your forms impact your signup rate:
By adopting a more user-friendly approach, you minimize the barriers to the user’s engagement with your site. More importantly, you show visitors that you respect their privacy, which, in turn, builds trust.
You might be wondering: “I do need this data, though, to understand my audience. How am I supposed to access it if I don’t add the necessary fields?” The key is to start with the basics and gather additional information down the line.
You can capitalize on your email marketing campaigns as an effective and low-cost alternative to collecting data.
To gather valuable customer data through your emails, you don’t need to invest in many or complex solutions. The best email marketing tools and practices not only enhance your lead generation but also offer multiple options on understanding subscriber needs and preferences.
The first step is to use robust yet affordable email marketing software to build straightforward and user-friendly sign-up forms. Ensure you only request their email address. To motivate them, emphasize what they’ll gain by joining your list. Exclusive discounts, access to premium content, and participation in loyalty programs are just a few of the benefits to persuade them.
Once they become your subscribers, your email service will help you gather additional valuable information through its reporting capabilities. You can monitor recipients’ interactions with your emails and track crucial metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and so on.
These insights allow you to personalize your emails and target subscribers with tailored offers. If you need more, you can use your email software to send surveys to your recipients, asking them to share their feedback about your products or services. Or they could set up their email preferences, helping you improve your messages and timing.
2. Your Pages Take Forever to Load
We all know that a page’s loading speed directly affects your website traffic. Also, it’s directly related to high bounce rates. In fact, here’s how page slow load times affect the probability of users bouncing:
Online visitors are ready to drop a site in just a few seconds if it takes a while to load or keeps displaying an error message. Aside from that, slow loading speed translates into poor user experience, which is a major deterrent for Google promoting your content.
For these reasons, fixing your page load times should be a top priority if you’re looking to reduce your bounce rate. And it’s easy to do so using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to access and analyze critical insights regarding your site speed. Here are some of the practices these tools might ask you to follow:
- Optimize your images: Large image files are usually heavy elements, which is one of the main reasons behind slow loading pages. Optimize your images by changing their format or using an image compression tool to reduce their size.
- Remove unnecessary scripts: Large websites may include unused scripts that load before your most valuable elements. To prevent this from happening, leverage a web performance tool to identify and remove unnecessary scripts.
- Choose a fast-hosting provider: Many website owners would rather use a mediocre hosting provider to reduce costs. But poor hosting can make or break your site loading time. So, invest in a fast and legit solution that doesn’t offer shared hosting between multiple websites.
By adopting these practices, you’ll see your web pages loading faster, which, in turn, will lead to less visitors turning away from your website.
3. You Haven’t Updated Your Content
If you have a high bounce rate, it might mean that your content is outdated. Of course, it’s only natural for websites with a long history to have older content. But to avoid high bounce rates, you need to plan a strategy where you regularly review and refresh your site’s content and remove what’s not relevant anymore.
High bounce rates could also indicate that you failed to optimize your content for your target audience. Let’s review some key actions for effective content creation:
- Check that your titles and meta descriptions show users what your content offers. It’s key to keep them short and concise, too. These elements help potential visitors understand what they will be clicking into and decide whether your page has what they’re searching for. But if they don’t find it on the page they land on, they’ll probably leave.
- Produce your content with visitors’ search intent in mind. By matching your content to search intent, you increase chances of ranking on Google’s first page. For instance, when the search intent is informational, people want to learn more about a specific topic. So, the content that ranks higher is usually informative blog posts. But if they’re doing research before buying a product, the first results are relevant product pages.
- Optimize your content and headings for keywords. The goal is for every web page to target one primary keyword that’s relevant to search intent and represents the page’s content. You should also add the primary keyword to your title, meta description, and main headers.
- Invest in carefully planning your content marketing strategy, enriching your pages with helpful and fresh articles and relevant data that meet your visitors’ expectations.
Updating your content consistently is a proactive approach that not only attracts and retains visitors but also positions your website as a valuable resource in your niche.
4. You Don’t Prioritize User Experience
Neglecting user experience is among the main reasons behind high bounce rates. As the term suggests, this process must always be about the users and their needs. The type of user experience you offer on your pages directly affects whether a visitor will return or how long they’ll stay and scroll through your content. So, your primary goal should be to make it easy and memorable.
There are many elements that affect the overall user experience. Is your layout simple and eye-pleasing? Is the site navigation confusing? Do you use an attractive color scheme and easy-to-read fonts? Do your page elements clutter the design?
So, here are the factors to consider to give users the best experience when they visit your site:
- Invest in simple, intuitive, and amazing design without unnecessary elements. Don’t bombard users with too many pop-ups, ads, or multiple call-to-actions that interrupt the experience.
- Add elements that provide value, enticing users to learn more about your brand and its offering. If you own an active blog, including a search box is a great way to help your readers explore more of its content effortlessly.
- To improve your website performance for all users, optimize the mobile experience. Using a responsive design, creating simple navigation menus, optimizing CTA size and placement, and keeping your content concise are some of the best practices for driving mobile website traffic.
- Mind your choice of color schemes to make a lasting impression and influence visitor behavior. You should achieve optimal color contrast between your background and your text to engage people with color vision deficiencies. For the same reason, avoid using too bold colors. Balanced color palettes create accessible web pages that all users can engage with. Let’s see different user groups who could benefit from web accessibility:
Remember that a seamless and memorable user experience will keep visitors on your site longer. What’s more, it’s what will make them return and turn into recurring visitors.
5. You Neglect Your Internal Linking Strategy
Adding internal links to related pages on your site urges them to discover helpful resources. As a result, a streamlined internal linking structure allows you to keep visitors engaged and increase page views. Not to mention it’s an integral part of every successful SEO strategy because it helps Google understand which are the valuable pages on your site.
The best part is that when users visit other blog posts, articles, and pages on your site through your internal linking process, they stop counting as bounces. This doesn’t mean you should stuff your pages with links or force them into your content. If you do, it will make a negative impression on your visitors and hurt your content’s readability.
What you should do instead is strategically place your internal links and use only relevant posts that offer visitors additional information. Also, make sure you add clear anchor texts, so readers understand what they’re about to read once they click on your links.
6. You Get Bad Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is the process of people visiting your website without looking for it on search engines. Instead, they discover it by clicking on a backlink on another site. With the right type of backlinks, you increase your visibility on reputable websites, getting your content in front of more people and diverse audiences.
The problem is that not all referral traffic is good. Perhaps you’re doing everything right in terms of content strategy and user experience but still see a high bounce rate due to bad backlinks from other sites.
What does this mean? It might be that the referring site uses poor copywriting, placing your link in an irrelevant context or using unclear and misleading anchor texts. These practices confuse readers and increase the chances of unqualified visitors landing on your site.
For instance, if you’ve written a guide about the best desktop sharing software and the referring site uses the anchor text “how to become an entrepreneur with zero budget”, it’s a recipe for disaster. If you come across such a case, you should contact the writer or the editor and ask them to remove the link or use it in a more relevant context.
It could also be that a percentage of your referral traffic comes from spammy or low-quality domains. Getting links from such sources does more harm than good, directly impacting your rankings in search engine results. The best way to prevent it is by checking the quality of the websites you do business with before letting them link back to your content. Also, partnering with sites that are relevant to your industry and content is crucial when generating backlinks.
Improving Your Website Experience
Unlike what you may think, a high bounce could be a blessing in disguise. Surely, it indicates potential issues with your website performance. At the same time, it urges you to check for improvements in specific aspects–like your content, user experience, internal linking, and so on.
But there’s also a chance you’re doing everything right, and still experiencing high bounce rates. Sometimes, a high bounce rate just means your content marketing works. Simply put, you create relevant content that helps visitors quickly find what they’re searching for. And since your site meets their expectations, they walk away.
Even so, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels. Dive into your Google Analytics and check other metrics, too, to find areas for improvement. For instance, monitor how users interact with your pages. If you find that they visit them and leave, try to optimize your conversion pages. Also, it’s crucial to consider user intent to assess whether your bounce rate is a cause for concern.
In every scenario, it’s a key engagement metric that serves as a roadmap on what needs to be fixed. Especially when you monitor bounce rates along with other crucial metrics and combine marketing strategies, you’re one step closer to improving user experience.