Search engines want content that provides a positive experience and if your site is slow it can provide a poor experience.
A slow loading website can lead to a high bounce rate as visitors lose patience and leave.
Google pagespeed insights.
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Bounce rate is a measurement of visitors who come to a website but then leave quickly (bounce) rather than continuing to view other pages of the website.
So what is a good and a bad bounce rate result? The simple explanation is, high bounce rate is bad and a low rate is good.
What is High Bounce Rate?
A high bounce rate is a metric used in website analytics like google analytics to describe the percentage of your visitors that leave the website after only visiting a single page.
The metric represents the proportion of visitors who “bounce” or exit the site without interacting with any other pages.
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What is causing a high bounce rate?
So, what’s causing your visitors to leave and how you can help improve your rates?
A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are not finding the content or information they are looking for, or that the website is not engaging enough to encourage them to explore further. A high bounce rate can also be the result of technical issues or poor user experience.
Low bounce rates are generally considered desirable, as they suggest that visitors are finding the information they need and are staying on the site to interact with additional pages.
These metrics are believed to affect a website’s ranking within search engine results pages (SERPs) so website SEO.
Reduce High Bounce Rate Checklist
Visitors are leaving your website quickly. Here are some ways to improve your bounce rate:
Load Time
Misleading Content
Check meta description and meta tags.
Visitors get an indication of what content is about from metadata make sure they match the content.
Readable Content
Short sentences, white space and great images.
Clear Calls to Action
Encourage visitors to take specific actions, for example, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase or speaking with a sales person.
Analysis Individual Pages
Locate which pages are contributing to the overall bounce rate.
Are the pages satisfying user intent?
Page Errors
Exceptionally high bounce rates can be blank pages, 404 pages, or pages not loading properly.
Bad Backlink
Referral traffic sending unqualified visitors or anchor text could be misleading.
Internal Links
Internal linking helps visitors explore your website and find other relevant content.
Content
Could your content just plain, boring and uninspiring? Make sure your website is visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Offer valuable and relevant information and content to your visitors.
Review Content and optimise for online reading.
Site Navigation
Is your site confusing to navigate? Do you have ads, pop-up that could be putting people off? Search box to find information quickly?
Mobile-Friendly
Websites need to be optimised to work on a mobile. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly:
More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the web, so make sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing.
Look great and load fast.
Fold Line
Keep important information and content above the fold line.
This means the first part of the page without having to scroll down.
Conduct A/B testing
Try different design and content variations to see what resonates with your visitors.
Implementing these strategies can help lower your metrics and improve the overall user experience on your website.
Frequently asked questions
Looking for more info? Here are some things we're commonly asked
SEO
Google's algorithm is constantly changing, and updates are very common. Most of these Google algorithm updates are minor and unnoticeable, but you’ll notice there is a big update at least once a year a large-scale overhaul of the SERP (search engine results page) that may impact your business and or your clients, but allows the algorithm to keep up with changing trends.
Read More: How do Google Algorithm Updates affect your website?
But what on earth is SEO? Or, for the non-acronym lovers out there, what is search engine optimisation? It is the way you can help increase traffic from search engines organically. What do we mean by organic traffic? Visitors find your website after finding you on a search engine's results page (SERP) and not through paid ads.
Read More: Basic Website SEO Checklist
Technical SEO is the technical changes you can make to help search engines crawl, index, and rank your website content. A successful SEO strategy includes both on-page and off-page SEO aspects. Off-page SEO involves building backlinks. On-page SEO involves the structure, content, and keywords of your website.
Read Me: Basic Technical SEO Checklist
Off-page SEO tactics are actions you can take to help your website rank better in search engine results pages.
Off-site SEO factors like backlinks and reviews are believed to weight ranking by up to 50%. Google Algorithms and ranking factors constantly change, but currently, these are helpful factors.
Read More: Off-page SEO Checklist
On-page SEO or Onpage optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising each individual webpage to perform the best it can. Impacting on the ability of the page to rank better in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Helping it rank higher in organic search results and earn more relevant traffic from the search engines can help you get the visitors your business wants.
Read More: On-page SEO Checklist
E-A-T SEO is Google way to try and be certain of the websites and content they are recommending to searchers. Google want to deliver the most relevant information — but also the correct, accurate information to their customers.
Read More: E-A-T SEO Google Checklist