When someone visits your site and then leaves without so much as clicking on a link or navigating to another page, it’s called a bounce. If your bounce rate or drop off rate is too high, you risk losing credibility in the eyes of Google, and your online visibility may suffer as a result.
Whether or not you should fear a high bounce rate depends on your overarching goals and the purpose of each landing page. Perhaps you don’t want people to spend hours browsing through your site. Maybe you simply want them to call a phone number or fill out a form that’s embedded on a particular page.
On the other hand, a high bounce rate could be a sign that something is wrong with your site. Perhaps it’s the content, the site design, or the lack of sound SEO practices. How do you know exactly what the problem is, and how do you fix it?
7 Common Reasons for a High Bounce Rate
Here are some of the most common reasons that people abandon a site without digging deeper or committing to an action:
1) Too Much Text
It’s not that you have too many words (long form articles actually tend to perform better in terms of SEO than shorter blogs). Rather, it’s that you don’t have enough space.
Large chunks of text intimidate people. If you’ve ever landed on a page filled with block paragraphs, you know the feeling: it’s as if you had hit a wall. Whether it’s due to bad writing or bad formatting, it doesn’t matter. Too much text scares people away.
You don’t have to limit yourself to one-sentence paragraphs, but you should leave enough breathing room so the eye can roam comfortably over the page without feeling a sense of anxiety or claustrophobia.
– Break up large paragraphs
– Use plenty of subheadings
– Add bullet points
– Insert charts and tables
– Include photos and other images
2) Too Few Links
A user-friendly navigation bar will encourage people to explore other areas of your site, but it’s not enough to significantly decrease your bounce rate.
For that, you need to incorporate links throughout your content. You can include them in the body of the text as citations or you can create a large button that features a strong call to action. Either way, you’re drawing the visitor further into the brand experience by seamlessly directing them from one page to another.
3) Low Quality Content
Content still drives traffic, but you can no longer fill your site with junk or promotions and expect to rank high in search results. That’s because Google has spent a lot of time tweaking its algorithms so that only high-quality content performs well.
Nowadays, in order to rank, you need to generate content that builds authority. Whether you write blog posts, record podcasts, or make videos, you should create content that people actually want to consume. It should inform, interest or amuse. Pure sales copy has its place, but you need to intersperse product descriptions and calls to action with more engaging content.
5 Tips for Creating Great Content
1. Solve problems (e.g. provide tips or guides)
2. Teach your audience something (e.g. post tutorials)
3. Have a good mix of evergreen (always relevant) content and timely material (e.g. announcements or news)
4. Give people up-to-date information (e.g. provide statistics or tell them about new tech)
5. Tell stories about your brand, your team, your customers, or anything else (storytelling is at the heart of the human experience)
4) Bad User Experience
Nothing drives people away like poorly designed websites, particularly sites that are inconsistent or hard to navigate. According to one survey, 79 percent of people say they wouldn’t return to a website that gives them a poor user experience. Whether it takes forever for your site to load, or whether your navigation bar is confusing, bad site design is a major culprit when it comes to bounce rates.
Load speed is particularly important. According to Google, a mere 4-second difference will increase the probably of a bounce by 90 percent. Another study by Akamai revealed that nearly 50 percent of people expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. The study also noted that a fast load time is key to consumer loyalty.
– Optimize your site for mobile devices
– Compress images
– Combine files
– Reduce HTTP requests
– Enable browser caching
– Defer JavaScript loading
5) Too Many Popups
To use popups or not to use popups? It’s a question that haunts many web developers. On the one hand, they work. The more assertive you are, the more conversions you’ll get. On the other hand, many visitors get annoyed and leave your site, never to return.
To solve the problem, you might opt for a Goldilocks solution. That’s another way of saying, be discriminate in your use of popups. Consider using them for email signups but stay away from too many ads.
6) No Call to Action
You spend a great deal of time crafting quality content. Now you need a hook. You don’t have to peddle a product at the end of every blog post or long form article, but you should include a strong call to action (CTA) that encourages visitors to do something – anything.
Think of it this way, you need to lead people further along the customer journey. If this is their first encounter with your brand, encourage them to learn more. If they’re repeat customers, tell them about your loyalty program.
Unfortunately, 70 percent of small B2B businesses don’t include CTAs on their site, and that devastates their conversion rates. If you don’t want to be one of them, be sure not to go out with a whimper.
7) Poor SEO Practices
There’s another reason people leave your site: the content simply isn’t relevant to their needs. The key to attracting high-value traffic is finding the right keywords. In order to do that, you need to choose terms that are relevant to your brand and in tune with your customers’ pressing needs as well as your sales goals.
If you’re not sure where to start, then it’s best to hire an experienced digital marketing firm to handle the more technical side of SEO. At National Positions, we know how to get results. For one, we’ll help you fix your bounce problem, which will put you on the road to solving your conversion problem.
