Learn 13 things that could be causing high bounce rate for your website

Definition of A Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing only one page on your site.

Basically, "high bounce rate" is a relative term, depends on the goals your organizations has, what the kind of site you have.

Low or too low bounce rates can be problems too.

According to one reputed Ad technology company, generally most of the websites see bounce rates between 26% to 70%, they provided a system that graded bounce rate further down:

25% or lower: Something is probably broken

26-40% : Excellent

41-55% : Average

56-70% : Higher than normal, but could make sense depending on the website

70% or higher : Bad and or something is probably broken

Google Analytics provides much greater insight into your site behavior under behavior column.

Below are the 13 reasons your website can have a high bounce rate:

1) Slow- to- Load Page

Google has included this report as a part of the Core Web Vitals, to be rolled out from May 2021.

Site speed is part of Google's ranking algorithm. Users want websites to load fast and provide results they need, but only 15% of websites on web are fully optimized for a good user experience, hence, Google has put so much work into feature snippets.

Web masters constantly need to fix this issue, thus, could use below tools like:

• Google PageSpeed Insights

• The Google Search Console Page Speed reports

• Lighthouse reports

• Pingdom

2) Self Sufficient Content

If your web page has sufficient content to fulfil users intent of read or act and then made users bounced, this can be a good thing for your page ranking.

The time spent on page and the average session duration by user for their search query sends a signal to Google of page relevancy.

3) Disproportional Contribution by a Few Pages

The single CTA landing pages if reasonably satisfy user intent and cause them to bounce quickly after taking an action, but the longer- form content pages have a lower bounce rate, then it's a good sign for site owners to probably claim higher ranking in SERPs.

4) Misleading Title Tag and / or Meta Description

The properly written Title tag or Meta description reduces the chances of users to bounce back, if not, they may think your site is on some particular expertise, only to find it isn't, and then bounce back to whence they came.

5) Blank Page or Technical Error

Check if your page or site is receiving exceptionally high bounce rate, i.e. users spending less than a few seconds on the page, it's likely your page is blank, returning a 404 error, or otherwise not loading properly.

6) Bad Link from Another Website

Check the links from the referring domains, they might could send you unqualified visitors or the anchor text and context for the link could be misleading.

7) Affiliate Landing Page or Single-Page Site

If you're an affiliate, the intent of your page is to refer users away from your website to the merchant's site. In such a scenario, having a high bounce rate will never be any issue to the web master.

For Single Page Apps, or SPAs, you can adjust your analytics settings to see different parts of a page as a different page, adjusting the Bounce rate to better reflect user experience.

8) Low- Quality or Under Optimized Content

Review your web content yourself or get an honest feedback from a person, if possible, has a background in content marketing. One possibility is that your content is perfect, but you haven't optimized it for online reading- or for the audience that you're targeting.

1) Are you writing in simple sentences?

2) Is it easily scannable with lots of header tags?

3) Does it clearly answers questions?

4) Have you included images to break up the copy and made it visually catchy?

The other possibility is that your content is poorly written overall or simply isn't something your audience is looking for.

Think of hiring a content writer or content strategist for a content that results in conversions.

9) Bad or Obnoxious UX

Is your website confusing to navigate?

May be your visitor wants to search for more recipes but they won't be able to find a search option or some menu items aren't clickable on a smartphone.

Make sure you're avoiding such common design errors, get your site reviewed from some web design or UX Pros, well before May 2021 since Google is about to roll out their Core Web Vitals as the new ranking factors.

10) The Page isn't Mobile- Friendly

Yes you heard it right, Google Indexing is switching to mobile-only next year. A study done some two years ago found that nearly a quarter of the top websites were not mobile-friendly.

Unoptimized for mobile, sites don't look good on mobile devices- and they don't load too fast too. And it's a reason for a high bounce rate.

Check for your site mobile friendliness using Google's free Test My Site tool. You can also check for mobile issues in the Search Console and Lighthouse.

Make sure your site works well i.e.. read and navigate in all formats -desktop, tablet and mobile and with accessibility devices.

11) Flawed Google Analytics Setup

Make sure you have properly implemented Google Analytics and added the tracking codes to all the pages on your site.

12) Content Depth

As a publisher / Blogger you can offer deep, interesting, interlinked content to make your audience compels to click on further down the pages.

Providing interesting, relevant internal links and give them a reason to spend more time on your site / blog.

13) Don't bug your site visitors

Asking too much information from your site visitors like their cards details, social security, family details will make your visitors leave your site before further interactions.

People are ready to be suspicious knowing how many scam sites are out there. The aim of a webmaster is to build up trust with the user and doing so will both increase consumer satisfaction and decrease your bounce rate.

A happy user is what being liked by Google.