The Importance of Your Bounce Rate

Your site’s bounce rate is important. This is the measure of how many people come to your site and then almost instantly leave. While it may be more encouraging to study positive numbers, such as your overall traffic or an increase in sales, you really want to seek to improve your negative numbers to enhance your site on the whole. Your bounce rate, when it’s too high, tells you that something is inherently wrong with your site or your content. You’re always going to have some people who navigate to the site and then leave, but you don’t want to see any massive increases in this area and you always want to work to reduce those numbers.

Why Does It Happen?

There are many potential reasons for a high bounce rate. First off, you may have optimized your site for keywords that do not reflect what your visitors are really looking for. You need to have a balance between the popularity of the keyword and the level of connection to your content. If readers expect one thing and quickly realize that your site doesn’t deliver, no matter how well it ranks for the terms they searched, they’re going to leave.

Another potential issue is simply a broken link. If the page doesn’t load or loads slowly, people aren’t going to wait or do more research to find the correct page. They’re going to move on. You need to consistently update your site and check for broken links. If you see a high bounce rate for a specific page, that’s an indicator that tells you to make sure everything is working properly.

Another reason is that your content just isn’t engaging or doesn’t hold the reader’s attention. Exactly what this means depends on the type of site you have and your target audience. Some readers want content that draws them in and that is very interesting. Others want quick bullet points and important information. Still others are looking for content that connects with them on a deeper level or an intellectual level. When your content doesn’t resonate with your readers, they’ll leave, so you have to consider this audience carefully. A person reading a page on high-level Forex trading is likely quite different than someone looking for celebrity gossip, and they have different expectations.

Finally, you may have issues that go beyond the text itself. Maybe the landing page has a confusing layout and visitors don’t know how to navigate to any other part of the site. Maybe the page is too busy and chaotic. Maybe it just looks like it doesn’t have a professional design. All of these things can turn people off. Similar to judging a book by its cover, they may take one look and bounce back to the search results page without bothering to actually read any of your content.

Improving Your Rates

Here at Content Customs, we’re happy to work with you to improve your bounce rate or any other rates — overall traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. We can help you break down the numbers and sort through the analytics data to find out what you’re doing well and where you can improve. Please get in touch with us today to learn more.