Check out the Reasons for High Bounce Rate

 Bounce rate

It has always been the First Impression that matters probably everywhere including for your website or blog as well. That’s what leads to higher or lower bounce rate. For all of you, who don’t really understand or bit confused about the term bounce rate, let me explain. The metric bounce rate is used to measure the number of people who visited a particular site and left the site from the first page itself (mostly home page). So, higher bounce rate means, more number of people leaving the site from the first page itself and lesser bounce rate means, very few people leaving the site from the first page with much larger number of them actually going deeper into the other pages of the sites. However, only exception to this rule may be the sites and blogs that just have one page only. Such sites obviously have the higher bounce rate and in fact, this metric of bounce rate may not hold that much importance. But then, there are other metrics which can help measure the quality of such one page blogs and sites.

In the SEO term, the sites with higher bounce rate are generally not seen as good sites and are not favored by the search engines leading to lower rankings,low traffic and adverse affects to their paid campaigns. On the contrary, sites with lower bounce rates gets all the benefits of SEO – ranking, traffic etc. When such a small metric hold such a large importance for a site, then obviously it makes sense to get deeper into it to understand what exactly causes the higher bounce rate. Here, I really won’t talk about the ways to reduce the bounce rate because once we understand the underlying causes for this, then solutions is implicit in the causes itself.

Content Relevancy

This acts as one of the important cause for the higher bounce rate. When people visiting a site don’t find the content relevant, then exiting the site would be their default choice leading to higher bounce rates. However, this factor can be seen from two perspectives. One, when the content of the site (as may visible to user from the first page) is not at all relevant to the title and blog/site niche. Second, when the content can be relevant to its title and topic. However, the person coming to site thru a particular keyword which may not be relevant for him. So that means, that keyword choice in this case may be irrelevant to the website content.

External Links

External links are the links leading to the external sites (outside your domain). These could be because of affiliates links or reference sites. Having too many external links (on the first page) may also increase the bounce rate drastically . This is because user of the site tend to click on the link which will take him to the external site and hence he would have left the parent site automatically.

Slow Performance

Slow performance or higher page load time can also be the main contributing factor to the higher bounce rate. For example, user visit a site and the site’s first page takes forever to load, so out of sheer frustration he /she would leave the site thinking it as a waste of time.

Content Quality

If all the above mentioned factors are OK then content quality could be the culprit contributing to the higher bounce rate. Content quality would mean either too much of duplicate content or content with much less readability due to too many grammatical errors,spelling mistakes etc or even may be the general writing style which is not easy to understand and quite confusing. In such cases, visitor may lose interest in the content and may not like to read further and go any deeper into the site to explore.

Not Enough Content

In case, user doesn’t find enough  information on his problem statement or the content on the subject is too low on your website, visitor would tend to leave the site and look elsewhere.

Lack of Easy Navigation

If the site has poor design and not very easy to navigate, then also visitor may leave it without trying to find the related links to go deeper into the site as he /she would confuse with the presentation of the information.

Above are the six main factors which you will find in majority of the cases wherein sites has higher bounce rate. Based on the above explanation, you can form the strategy as to how to improve it depending upon which factor is contributing the most in your case

. A point of caution though, don’t go for any shortcut tricks to improve the bounce rate other than properly SEO-ing your site and taking care of the above mentioned factors. 

There are many shortcut tricks available to improve your bounce rate almost immediately and drastically but that change would be temporarily and will lead to lots of adverse affects for your site and blog in the longer run. Objective of any site or blog, is not to have a lower bounce rate only but site is created aimed to sell something, provide information. So using such shortcut may improve your bounce rate but may not really have any positive changes to the product /service being sold or draw a good amount of visitor or even repeat visitors.