High bounce rate is a common topic of conversation.
It causes web marketers to stiffen their shoulders and analysts to scowl with worry.
When you look at your statistics, you may be perplexed as to why your bounce rate is so high.
Bounce Rate-What Is It?
“Bounce” is a term used by Google to describe a single-page session on your website.
A website’s “bounce rate” is the number of visitors who depart back to the SERPs (search engine results pages) after visiting just one page.
This may happen even if a person spends more than 30 minutes on a website.
In other words, why is it harmful to have a high bounce rate?
That being said, it’s important to understand what “high bounce rate” really means for your business and website.
If you have low bounce rates, or if they are excessively low, this may be an issue as well.
According to SEMRush research, a bounce rate of 56% to 70% is high. An average bounce rate would be around 41% to 55%, and a good bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.
There are many reasons why your website’s bounce rate might be high.
Based on the information we have, we came up with a way to grade bounce rates:
- At 25% or less, it’s likely that nothing is wrong.
- 26-40%: Very Good
- 41% to 55% on average
- 57%–67%: an unusually high percentage, but one that might make sense given the website in question.
- Bad and/or something is probably broken if the percentage is 70% or higher.
Google Analytics’ Audience Overview tab displays your site’s total bounce rate.
In most views of Google Analytics, you can see the bounce rate for particular channels and pages.
The following are typical causes of a high bounce rate on your website, as well as solutions to these problems.
A lengthy loading time for a page
As part of the Core Web Vitals project, Google is placing a greater emphasis on page load times for sites.
The bounce rate may be severely affected by a page that takes a long time to load.
Google’s ranking formula includes factors such as page load time.
For Google, a good user experience means fast-loading pages, slow-loading pages result in high bounce rates. Users do not want to wait a long time for a site to load.
Users want the data quickly.
If it takes more than a few seconds for your website to load, your visitors may get impatient and click away.
For the majority of SEOs and marketers, improving site speed is a never-ending task.
But the good news is that with each repair, your speed should get a little bit faster.
Check the speed of your website’s pages using the following tools:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console PageSpeed Insights
- The Lighthouse speed test.
- Pingdom.
- GTmetrix.
Among the suggestions they’ll make include lowering the number of third-party scripts on your site, optimizing your graphics, and using browser caching.
Content that is self-contained
There are times when your content is so good that people can read it, get the information they need, and leave. Give them a reason to go to the bottom of the content, or to go to another page on your site.
I think this is a fantastic opportunity.
The goal of a content marketer may have been met if you made a piece of content that kept the reader’s attention for a short time.
You could also have a landing page that only needs people to fill out a short lead form.
The Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration indicators in Google Analytics will help you decide if a high bounce rate is good or bad.
User experience and A/B tests may also help you determine whether the high bounce rate is an issue.
If a person stays on your website for a few minutes or longer, that tells Google that your page is a good match for their search query.
That type of user intent is great if you want to rank for that specific search query.
You may want to provide a link to a related blog article after completing the form if the visitor spends less than a minute on the page (such as on a well-optimized landing page with a quick-hit CTA form).
One or Two Pages Make an Unreasonable Amount of Difference.
You may have a few pages on your site that are contributing disproportionately to your site’s total bounce rate, as mentioned above.
Google is rather adept at telling the difference between the two.
After a visitor completes an action on one of your CTA landing pages, you should see a decrease in the bounce rate for your longer-form content pages.
In order to verify this, you will need to look into the sites with a high bounce rate and see if there are any that should not be causing so many people to depart at once.
Open Google Analytics and sort by bounce rate under Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
To keep the results from being skewed, you might want to use a more complicated filter.
As a general rule, I try to choose a volume that is just right for the page.
Select the number of visits that makes sense for your site, whether it’s 100 or 1,000, then click on Advanced and select Sessions larger than that.
Meta Descriptions and Title Tags not related to the content
You should ask yourself: Is the content of your page adequately described by your title tag and meta description?
If this isn’t the case, users may come to your site expecting one thing, only to discover that it isn’t, and then go immediately back to the SERPs.
Although it may have been the result of an accident or an attempt to manipulate the system, this can be fixed easily enough. It doesn’t matter whether it was a simple error or an attempt to game the system.
Either modify your page’s content to answer the search queries you want to draw people for, or change the title tag and meta description to reflect that.
You can also see what type of meta description Google has created for your page for typical queries, and if they make it worse, you can correct that.
Technical faults or blank page
It’s possible that your page is blank, producing a 404, or otherwise not loading correctly if your bounce rate is very high and you find that individuals are spending little time on the page.
Use the most common browsers and devices (like Safari for desktop and mobile or Chrome) to try to recreate what your audience will see.
Google’s opinion may also be seen in the Search Console under Coverage.
Fix the problem yourself or get help from someone who can—a problem like this might lead Google to quickly remove your page from the search results.
Another Website’s Bad Link
Your bounce rate from organic search results may be low, but even if you do everything right, your bounce rate from referral traffic may be high.
If the anchor text or context of a link is wrong, you might be getting visitors who are not qualified.
Sloppy copywriting may contribute to this issue.
Incorrectly linking to your site or not linking to your site at all was done by the author or publisher.
If the article’s author can’t change it after it’s been published, they should contact the article’s editor or webmaster.
In any case, politely request that they take down the link to your website or change the context.
Because of this, it’s possible that the site linking to you is trying to hurt your SEO on purpose.
For example, with the anchor text of “Free Get Rich Quick Scheme,” for example, they may have connected to your Guide to Adopting a Puppy.
Even if you don’t get a response from the person who linked to your site, it’s still a good idea to update your disavow file in Search Console.
Even though disavowing the link won’t lower your bounce rate, it will tell Google that the link from that site shouldn’t be taken into account when figuring out how good and relevant your site is.
Affiliate Site on a Single Page
As an affiliate, your page may only exist to send people to the website of the merchant.
If the page has a high bounce rate, you’re doing a good job.
If you have a single-page website, such as a landing page for your ebook or a basic portfolio site, you may find yourself in a similar situation.
As a result, visitors tend to leave quickly, resulting in a high bounce rate.
Keep in mind that Google can typically identify whether a website is meeting user intent even if the user’s inquiry is responded to promptly (sites like WhatIsMyScreenResolution.com come to mind).
In the event that you’d want to tweak your website’s bounce rate, you may do so at your own discretion.
Your analytics settings for Single Page Applications, or SPAs, may be adjusted to perceive various portions of a page as separate pages, thereby altering the bounce rate to more accurately represent user experience.
Poorly Optimized or Low-Quality Content
Your website’s content may be driving away customers because it is subpar.
Take a long, hard look at your page and have a trusted colleague or friend critique it for you.
(Ideally, this person has experience with content marketing or copywriting, or they are part of your target audience.)
Your material might be wonderful but not optimized for online reading — or for the audience that you’re attempting to reach.
- Are you using simple sentences (as opposed to the complex ones used by PhDs) in your writing?
- Are there too many header tags to read?
- Is it clear and concise in its responses?
- Has your material been broken up with visuals to make it easier to read?
Creating content for the internet is distinct from creating content for print media.
By getting better at writing online copy, you can get people to spend more time reading your online content.
There’s also a chance that your writing is bad or that your readers won’t care about it.
Follow our guide on how to create SEO friendly content for more information on this.
Obnoxious or Bad UX.
Are you bombarding your visitors with advertisements, pop-up surveys, and email subscription buttons?
CTA-heavy features like these may find marketing and sales teams attractive, but too many of them might make a visitor flee.
The user experience is at the center of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are both ranking factors and ways to improve the user experience.
Is your website difficult to use?
Visitors may want to go further, but if your blog lacks a search box or the menu items are difficult to click on a smartphone, they may never find out what more you have to offer.
We know our websites inside and out as internet marketers.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that what we take for granted is a complete mystery to our target audience.
The Site Isn’t Mobile-Friendly.
We know that having a mobile-friendly website is crucial, but the practice isn’t always followed in practice.
Soon, Google’s index will only include mobile sites.
According to research conducted in 2018, nearly two-thirds of the most popular websites are still not mobile-friendly.
They don’t load quickly or appear decent on a mobile device if a website isn’t optimized for mobile.
The high bounce rate is the result of it.
You may still have a website that doesn’t seem to be mobile-friendly even though it was built utilizing responsive design principles.
When a website is resized for a mobile device, important information may be pushed below the fold.
While someone visits your site from a mobile device, they no longer get a headline that corresponds to what they saw when searching.
They return to Google if the page does not meet their needs.
Check it out on your phone instead of your desktop if it has a high bounce rate but no obvious faults.
Google’s free Mobile Test My Site tool may help you detect non-mobile-friendly sites on a large scale.
The Search Console and Lighthouse may also be used to check for mobile problems.
Make sure your site is simple to read and navigate on desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms.
Setup issues with Google Analytics
If you haven’t set up Google Analytics right, some of the pages on your site may be missing tracking tags.
Here’s how to solve it, according to Google.
The breadth of the material
Google can give short answers through highlighted snippets and knowledge panels, but you can give users more detailed, interesting, and linked information.
If you want readers to keep reading, make sure your material is compelling.
Give visitors a reason to remain on your site by providing them with intriguing and relevant internal connections.
Also, provide a TL;DR summary at the top for those who are looking for a short solution to the question.
No trust
Asking for sensitive information like a user’s credit card information or social security number is a bad idea since the person doesn’t yet trust you.
There are a lot of scam websites out there, so people are prepared to be skeptical.
Many people will leave a site if they see a big window pop up and ask for personal information.
As a webmaster or content creator, if you can build trust with your customers, they will be happier and your bounce rate will go down.
Google is a fan of anything that makes its people happy.
Don’t Let Yourself Get Worried
It’s not the end of the world if your website has a high bounce rate.
Some gorgeous, well-designed websites have a high incidence of abandonment.
For many websites, bounce rates are a good indicator of how well the site is doing, but if they aren’t handled with care and precision, they may become an overly simplistic gauge of how well things are.
Presenting bounce rates in a vacuum is misleading.
Sometimes, you want a bounce rate of medium to high.
Make sure that you don’t slow down your visitors or prevent them from returning to your site in an attempt to “correct” bounce rates that aren’t an issue in the first place.
That frustrates the user, and they won’t return to your site in the future because of it.
Your earnings will be much worse than a “bounce,” regardless of how the numbers seem on the surface.
Reducing Your High Bounce Rate
Whatever the cause of your site’s high bounce rate, here are some best practices you may apply to reduce it.
Make an effort to exceed expectations with your content.
In Google, your website’s title tag and meta description serve as a virtual billboard for your site.
Your content must be consistent with what you’re promoting in the SERPs.
If your page is only a few paragraphs long, don’t label it an “ultimate guide.”
If your customer reviews show that your vacuum gets 3 stars, don’t say it’s the “best.”
You get the gist of it.
Your material should be readable as well.
- Use a lot of white space to break up your content.
- Add photos to your text.
- Simplify your writing.
- Spellcheck is there to help you out!
- Use a clean and simple design.
- Try to avoid using too many advertisements.
Keep the Essential Elements at the Top of the Page.
At first sight, visitors may not be able to discern whether your content is in line with what you describe in your title tag and meta description.
People form opinions about a website as soon as they get there.
You want the initial impression to confirm what the visitors expected to see when they came.
A prominent H1 should match the title people see when they search on Google.
Ideally, the image on an e-commerce site should correspond to the product description.
- Good initial impressions go a long way!
- Make sure your content isn’t pushed down by banners.
- Make sure the page loads with what the user is looking for.
Improve Your Website’s Load Times
Faster is usually better when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).
Your SEO to-do list shouldn’t be complete without addressing the issue of site speed.
There will always be new techniques to compress, optimize, and speed up the loading process.
- AMP should be implemented.
- Before you put photos on your website, make sure they have the smallest display size possible.
- It’s time to delete any unnecessary external or load-heavy code or stylesheets. Remove any that you no longer use. See if there’s a quicker way to get the ones you do need.
- Use a CDN, reduce the size of JavaScript and CSS, and enable browser caching to get started.
- To get additional ideas, check out Lighthouse.
Reduce the Number of Non-Required Components
Ads, in-line promotions, and other unwanted items should not be a constant presence on your site.
Visitors may leave a website due to visual overload.
Are there any particular CTAs that are especially crucial to the page’s success?
That should be emphasized strongly.
Everything else may go in the footer or sidebar.
You can’t stop editing!
Have great site architecture
Do you want more visitors to look around your website?
Make things as simple as possible.
- Predictive search, useful filters, and an improved “no results found” page are all ways to improve on-site search.
- Redesign your site’s navigation and run A/B tests to see how the use of complicated vs. simple drop-down menus impacts your bounce rate.
- When writing long-form pieces, create a table of contents that includes anchor links that direct readers to the specific area they’re interested in.
Summary
If you’ve read this far, you now know what’s causing your high bounce rate and how to fix it.
Good sites attract good users, so make yours informative, user-focused, and lightning-fast.
Keep learning SEO:
Get a 100% Click Through Rate (CTR) on Google SERPs – Step by Step
Off page SEO checklist guide to the top
What is meant by backlinks in SEO?