5 Reasons Why Your Website's Bounce Rate is High

A bad bounce rate not only kills conversion rates but also your marketing ROI.

A high bounce rate does not just mean that visitors are finding your website difficult to use, it may also indicate that you have a poorly designed website or one that is simply not relevant enough to the target audience.

Additionally, the readability of the content also affects the bounce rate. There are many things you must do when you create a website that is important for lowering your bounce rate, and if you didn’t do them right, you might have some things to fix. We have handpicked for you some of the most common reasons behind higher bounce rates which will hopefully help you reduce your bounce rate, rank higher on Google, increase engagement and traffic, and boost your site's conversions.

In this post, we are going to talk about some of the main reasons why your bounce rate is high and how you can fix it.

Not Targeting the Right Audience

Are you making sure that your website is targeted well enough at the people you want to get information from? If not, then you are going to experience problems.

Check the source of your incoming traffic and see if it's where you want it to be; if you're getting a lot of search engine traffic, then make sure your SEO copy is optimized. On the other hand, if most visitors are coming from social media sites, then make sure that your blog has content they will find useful or interesting.

Optimizing for traffic means creating content about topics that viewers will care about while using keywords that go along with those interests which will aid in organic search results. You should customize content based on location, keywords, etc. The more specific you can make yourself appear, the better.

Though Google analytics will provide you with most of the data, the easiest way to find your target audience is by running a Facebook ad, you can find out the combination that shows the most engagement, and based on that data, you can

Misleading Title Tag and/or Meta Description

Misleading Meta Titles and descriptions are nothing new to the Internet marketing world. However, the number of websites that employ these tactics has increased in the last few years. A website with a misleading Title tag and/or Meta description will have a significantly higher bounce rate.

Misleading Title tags and descriptions work to prompt users to click on your site when it is not truly relevant to their search query or interest. Once they visit your site, they are trying to figure out what your site is all about and soon realize that it's not providing what they were looking for.

This leads them back to their browser where they find another website more relevant to their interests – thus leading them away from yours.

Be sure to always keep these below 90 characters so they are clear and relevant.

Low-Quality and Outdated Content

Low-quality content is the death of any website and can be difficult to reverse. High-quality content is what attracts visitors and keeps them on your page. If you get the attention of your target audience on page one, then they will stay longer, read more pages and return back to your site again.

If you are going to update any information on your website make sure it is relevant and up-to-date otherwise visitors may think that your company must not care much about them if they can't even keep their websites current with the latest news/stats, etc.

Error 404 – Page Not Found

First of all, your 404 error page should be set up with a link back to the homepage and not an error message because it's important that you always redirect people to useful content. This is especially true if you don't have a lot of resources to develop separate pages for this type of situation.

Correctly designed 404 error pages will help your bounce rate become lower than it would otherwise be since visitors may think that there was nothing relevant on your site in the first place. If they find out otherwise, then they can come back and check out other areas of the website instead of leaving altogether which means less lost traffic!

Slow loading pages

Website speed is now a ranking factor and can have an impact on your conversion rates. There are many factors that go into making a website load quickly but there are three big things you can do to help make sure that people will stick around long enough to get the information they need.

Do not use flash for loading pages as it slows down everything else, keep it simple instead and include only what visitors need to see first before viewing the rest of the content which should be right-aligned so it loads after all other content has loaded.

Conclusion

There are many more reasons that could lead to the high bounce rate but these 5 have proven to be some of the most common over time. Whether you are trying to figure out what caused this in past visits or how you can improve your website so it does not happen in the future, it is important that you look for these things before anything else.