Bounce rate is one way an SEO can compute a websites’ success and there are actually a basis for internet marketing experts concern for high bounce rates.
What is a bounce rate?
Bounce rate is actually the percentage of visitors to your website that leaves the page directly without clicking through any other page on the website.
Now here are a few reasons for a website’s high bounce rate,
Internal Factors:
a. Web Design and Usability
Keep in mind that presentation is quite important. If you don’t have a good web design or has design flaws that make it uncomfortable for visitors, they will more likely just close your webpage off. Provide a simple and nice design for your site with good content so that your visitors will stay
b. Website Content
You should also make sure that your website contains important and useable information for your visitors. If you have good web content and the interface easy, you will surely have loyal visitors who will visit your site often.
c. Navigation
If you wish for your website visitors to stay and click through your pages make sure that navigation of your website is easy and clear. Don’t leave your visitors guessing as to where they’re supposed to go next.
d. Technical Issues
There are times when some php code shows up rather than the content, make sure that you check your website for loading times and correctness of all your scripts. Visitors tend to get discouraged when they see that not all the scripts of the website is working and as such you get a high bounce rate.
Marketing Factors
a. Poor Keyword Selection
Keyword marketing is a marketing strategy where website can get a lot of traffic from. If you choose a non-related keyword to your site, then you just get a lot of visitors looking for something different from what your website offers and this will certainly result in a high bounce rate for you website.
b. Ad Copy
These represent your website in the paid web search category and if the representation you get is not apt for your website then the likelihood of your website having a high bounce rate will be high as well.
c. Page Title and Meta Tagging
Search engines usually display the page title and meta description in the search results snippets and if your page title and meta tags is not connected or related to your webpage content, you can certainly increase the likelihood of high bounce rate.
External Factors
a. Irrelevant results from Search Engines
There are times when search engines list irrelevant results from a search and if your website happens to be one of these then most probably your visitor will just close it.
b. Improper External links
It’s rare but it can happen. If an external website links to your site that makes use of an anchor text that is not related then most probably your website will be closed by the visitor.
High bounce rate can destruct your website’s conversion path, but actually its pretty simple to fix. If you’ve not given any attention to your sites bounce rate before, start doing it today. It might create dramatic improvement in your website.
October 10th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Thanks for the video. I learn a few new things on bounce rate.
December 24th, 2011 at 10:49 am
This is an informative video. Actually bounce rate occurs if a website doesn’t convert very well. To avoid this, the site owner can give some free informative stuffs in return for registration. So that, conversion rate increases and bounce rate decreases.
Thank you.