You may have been receiving all the traffic in the world on your website, but if it isn’t converting, it is really of no use. The dreadful term of high bounce rate makes the true online marketers all worried because they see all their efforts going into vain due to it. Are you wondering what bounce rate is?
Well, the bounce rate is a percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing one page or more pages. Whereas “High” or “low” is a relative term used with bounce rate. A study from RocketFuel showed that most of the websites observe bounce rate between 26% to 70%.
Google Analytics is widely used to gauge the performance of the website through several metrics. Google measures the performance of the website through several developed metrics, and the bounce rate is one of them. This smart analytical app also provides the bounce rate for individual channels and pages to provide a better idea about the lackings.
You can further drill down the data and find out the bounce rate in different visitor acquisition channels. Well, there are several reasons your website can have a high bounce rate. Let’s discuss seven common and most important reasons why potential traffic bounces away.
The speed of the site:
Speed is the most common and prominent factor of bouncing the coming traffic away. If your site takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load, then I’d like to inform you first handedly that you are darned. Because no one has got time to wait. There are endless options over the internet, and the visitor will find a replacement of you. Speed is one of the core factors upon which Google ranks your website. Fixing the speed of the site can help the SEO of your site in the longer run.
It can’t always be true that a website you’re trying to reach is a slow, slow internet connection at the user’s end can also be one of the cases of bounce rate. I’d recommend all the internet surfers to get themselves high-speed internet connection in order to drive the most out of your internet searching. Click here to find the best bundle deals and packages for yourself.
Meaningless Meta title and tags:
Meaningless or misleading Meta title or Meta description can cause great damage to the SEO of your website and will certainly lift the bounce rate up. You don’t know what Meta description is? Well, the following picture will give you a better idea. Meta description consists of 160 characters which define what the webpage is about.
The arrow is pointing towards the meta description. If the Meta title and description are to provide relevant information to the user about a specific webpage so that the user has a fair idea what the page is about. Google also takes the Meta title and description in great regard in order to rank your website.
Some blank pages or technical errors:
It often occurs that you optimize a keyword for a specific webpage, but that page faces some technical difficulty due to which visitors can not view it. This is a very common reason for bounce rate. It is highly recommended to perform an audit once a month to keep a keen eye on the technical issues as well as conventional issues. This way, you can minimize a great number of issues without them affecting your sites DA and traffic rate.
Bad backlinks:
It is highly possible that you might have been doing all you can do to get a low bounce rate but still getting a high percentage of bounce rate through referral traffic. Why referral traffic is contributing to a high bounce rate? Well, there are several reasons for it.
- The referral traffic is not coming from a relevant niche
- People are not getting what they want on your web page
- A sloppy web copy can also be a reason
The major issue with referral traffic bounce is mostly because of the relevancy. If you’re getting a link from an irrelevant website, then I’ll consider it a bad backlink as it won’t contribute to getting the relevant and interested traffic towards your website.
Poorly optimized landing pages:
Poorly optimized landing pages are also a big reason for high bounce rate. For instance, you have optimized a page of Cox TV with spectrum silver package. Now the audience which is looking spectrum silver cable packages will land on Cox TV’s page and bounce back immediately. As it is not presenting the audience with content, they are actually looking for. This concept is called page cannibalization. Thoroughly audit your landing pages and their keywords with which they have been optimized. Look out for the factors like cannibalization, responsiveness issues, etc. which are causing the audience to go away.
Nonfriendly interface:
The readily available information and a user-friendly interface are necessary to make the audience better probe your platform. If you are annoying your visitors with constant pop-ups, ads and subscribe buttons, etc. they certainly are going to go away from your platform. CTA features like these are irresistible to the marketing teams, but excessive use of it will make the visitors run for the hills.
A confusing or difficult to navigate website which makes probing difficult for the visitor to find out the relevant information. The visitor will instantly get frustrated by your website. The frustrated visitors surely will find themselves an alternate platform which provides the same services. Most of the education websites are seen to have an ambiguous website and a confusing navigational system which makes it difficult for visitors to extract the useful information.
An Unsteady Google Analytics Setup:
It is also possible that you may have been receiving a high bounce rate because you haven’t implemented Google Analytics properly. Google Analytics is a tool to analyze the traffic of the website and finding probable causes which are making the traffic to bounce away. So implementing the analytics code rightly is an important job to analyze the actual statistics of your sites rightly.
I hope that the article must have succeeded in adding value to your knowledge. Now that you’ve identified the major issues which are causing your site to experience high bounce rate get into the depth of the issues and try to minimize them to improve the performance of your website.
Author Bio: Saira A is a content strategist at Spectrum Voice and has keen interest in technology and sports. She absolutely enjoys educating people out of her experience. She is constantly writing to enable her readers to achieve their set goals in SEO, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, PPC, SMM and Affiliate Marketing.