If you regularly study your site's performance on Google Analytics, you will be more than familiar with its bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site after only viewing one page.
Whether that's the homepage, a blog post, a product page or a landing page it doesn't matter. Before you start worrying, however, it's worth bearing in mind that most websites have bounce rates that range between 26%-70%.
If you're regularly seeing bounce rates of more than 70%, it may be down to one of the following reasons:
Slow to load pages
It has long been established that Google includes the loading speed of sites in its ranking algorithm. Good web design and strong server performance will contribute to having a quick loading site, but without either of them, you may be facing an uphill battle.
Ultimately, Google wants to provide its users with a positive experience, and slow loading pages provide a poor experience. If you find your pages take longer than 3-4 seconds to load, your visitors are going to leave.
Misleading titles or meta descriptions
You should always be asking whether the content of your pages is accurately captured by your meta description and title tag. If it isn't, then it's highly likely that visitors will enter your site expecting to find one thing, only to be confronted by another. If a visitor can't find what they're after, they aren't going to stick around. Whether this is an innocent mistake on your part or not doesn't really matter, but the good news is that it's easy enough to fix.
A simple content review of pages with a high bounce rate will determine whether or not the meta descriptions are accurate. Then you can either rewrite the title tag and meta description, or you can adjust the content.
Poor UX
One of the biggest contributing factors to a high bounce rate is poor UX (user experience). If you have an eCommerce site, your UX should be straightforward, clear and allow users to make a purchase simply and quickly.
A lot of companies get obsessed with driving their conversion rate up and bombard visitors with ads and intrusive call to actions. It's about striking the right balance between persuasion and letting visitors browse your products and services at their own speed.
Your site should also be easy to navigate and allow people to explore without losing their way. If you're experiencing a high bounce rate on your site, talk to Orangesoft today about how our web design expertise can help.