Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which a visitor exits your website without browsing any further. This is an important parameter in on-page SEO. Since it negatively impacts the whole SEO process, business owners, SEO agencies, and webmasters try to keep the bounce rate to the minimum.
You can calculate your bounce rate with the help of Google Analytics. Let us understand the ranges of bounce rate. If your bounce rate is in between 26% and 40%, it is considered as excellent. Further, if your bounce rate lies between 41% to 55%, it is average. And if it is between 56% to 70%, it can be dangerous.
If you want to keep the bounce rate under 40%, you need to understand the causes. Only when you know the causes you can develop strategies to limit it. Here are the top reasons why your website has a high bounce rate.
1. Slow website
Let us begin with the most obvious reason for a website to have a high bounce rate. You might have come across a couple of websites that took too much time to load. What did you do? Waited for the site to load or closed the window straight away?
People over the internet expect a site to open quickly, especially within three seconds. If it takes time, they are going to abandon your website, which increases your bounce rate and impacts your search engine ranking. If you do not know what is the speed of your site, use this free tool and find out.
2. Too many ads
Displaying online ads on your website is one of the most common methods to earn money. However, this should be done in the limit. Bombarding your site with ads will put your visitors off. As a result, they will not be interested in browsing your site, which results in a high bounce rate.
Did you know, SEO experts also suggest not to use too many ads. That’s because too many ads spoil user experience, which is one of the core ranking signals. Further, too many ads, especially in the above-the-field region, can attract Google penalty. So, it is best to limit ads to a good number and focus more on user experience.
3. Mismatch
A visitor doesn’t simply come to your website. He comes with an expectation. He needs something, some product, some information, or some service. When there is a mismatch between the visitors’ expectation and the content found on the website, it leads to a higher bounce rate.
So it makes sense to avoid tall promises and make practical claims. Your social media marketing campaign, email marketing campaign, and Pay Per Click campaign should run on this principle. People are going to leave your site the moment they see something else other than what they have expected. Hence, as a business owner, you should try to create only those expectations, which you can fulfill.
4. Poor navigation
When a visitor comes to your website, he or she tends to navigate between different web pages such as service page, about us, contact us, and case study pages. If your website has poor navigation, he or she will get confused and exit.
To avoid this you need to have good navigation. Here are the tips to have great website navigation.
Keep it simple
Place call to action button in the right place
Keep the navigation predictable
Make the content easy to scan
There is an easy method to guess how good the navigation of your site is. Ask your family members, colleagues and friends to visit your site. When they finish their browsing session ask the below questions.
Where you able to find what you were looking for?
Was there any difficulty in moving from one place to another place of the same site?
How many stars will you give to the overall navigation experience?
Do you have any improvement ideas for making the navigation better?
5. Boring design and animation
When it comes to web designing, you have to make things interesting. Poor or boring design and animation are the ones that put off a visitor. If a visitor loses interest on your website, why will he continue to browse?
Let the design be modern, unique and relevant to your business. The more unique your web design is, the more likely you will have the revisitors. Do not copy the web design. Let the web design be fresh and original. If you don’t have the required tools and knowledge, it is good to take the help of web designers.
6. Wall of text
A wall of text is a large block of text without any gaps or paragraphs. Usually, the wall of text is used by the newcomers. When a visitor comes and sees your webpage, he will not find any heading, subheading or paragraphs. He will find it difficult to scan the content on the website.
It becomes difficult for the visitor to understand the context. In the end, he prefers to leave the site instead of reading the whole thing. So, make sure you do not use a wall of text. Let there be sufficient gaps between the texts. Doing so will not only improve the appearance but also make it scannable.
7. Low-quality content
Why do people come to your site? What do they want? Information, right? That is the reason why Google has made the quality of the content as the number one ranking signal. Now that does not mean one should focus on creating quality content only for improving SEO.
You can expect more sales only when your visitors opt to stay on your website. They are not going to stay on your site for more than 10 seconds if you have poor quality content. Yes, it takes only ten seconds to judge who good or bad the content present on a website is.
It makes sense to hire a content writer to write the content for your website or blogs. Copying content or generating poor content to save money can put your entire marketing campaign at risk. In the end, the act of saving money can become a reason for losing a lot of money.
8. Sending the wrong people to your website
The main goal of social media marketing, email marketing, and link building is to send traffic to your web pages. However, while doing so, you must target the right people or audience. If your web pages sell plywood, you should mainly focus on carpenters. If you target school students, they will come to your site and abandon it.
Therefore, it makes sense to first find out who are your potential customers are. Only when you know who your customers are, you can target them using various digital marketing methods.
9. Thin or no content
Visitors judge you by reading the content on your website. If you have thin or no content, they will not hesitate to exit your site. From the SEO point of view also, it is necessary to have a decent quantity of content on your website.
Only when you have a decent quantity of content you will be able to rank your web pages for various keywords. The more content you develop, the more opportunity you will have to target a higher number of keywords.
10. Pop up
Pop up can increase or decrease your bounce rate. It all depends on how you use them. If you are able to display the pop up on the right place and time, it will save a visitor from exiting your website. This is not easy, you have to do it smartly.
If you use too many pop-ups or display them in the wrong place and time, it will annoy the visitors. Normally, an internet user is more likely to hate the pop-ups. If you do not have sufficient knowledge regarding how to leverage pop-ups, it is good to not to use them.
11. Autoplay videos
Majority of the internet users find autoplay videos annoying, irrespective of how good the video is. The main reason for this is internet users want to have control in their hand. Imagine you are sitting in a public place or home. You clicked on a link which took you to a site and all of the sudden a video starts to play. How embarrassing will it be?
How should you fix this? This issue has the easiest solution. That is, do not use autoplay videos. Autoplay videos are suitable only for certain web pages. Use it, only if you are sure that it is going to help your business.
12. Spelling mistakes
Nobody likes spelling mistakes in the content. If your content has spelling mistakes, then the people will form a negative opinion about your website and business. You will lose both trust and the visitor at the beginning itself. Spelling mistakes are common and inevitable. No matter how careful you are, you will tend to do spelling mistakes. How to fix this issue? Use online tools such as Grammarly, WhiteSmoke, Kibin, and Wordy. These tools highlight the spelling and grammar mistakes and suggest the correct versions.
