Your Bounce Rate Can Help You Find Content Issues
It’s clear to you that having a high bounce rate is a detriment to your business, making it an important metric to watch. It simply means that a lot of people land on that specific page and then leave quickly without ever navigating to another page. If they have very low dwell times, meaning that they leave the site in seconds after landing, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic. If your site is designed to sell a product or service, you’re also potentially losing a lot of conversions and sales.
While you are certainly right that having such a high bounce rate is a negative thing to discover about your site, don’t despair. You can learn a lot from this, and then you can implement changes to reduce that rate.
Your SEO Is Working Initially
First of all, something about your SEO is certainly working, as people are finding your site. They are using the keywords that you’ve optimized for. You’re getting that initial traction. This is all very positive, as many companies struggle just to get traffic to begin with. They’re trying to get any eyes on their pages, and they’re trying to figure out what searches their audience is running. You have already done that, which is a good base. So, a high bounce rate is not all negative, after all.
High Bounce Rate May Due to Your Content
What this suggests is that your content itself is the problem. Readers aren’t seeing the value. Maybe they’re asking a specific question, for instance, and your content doesn’t answer it. They see the link when they run the search, and your site ranks highly, but the content needs to be updated or redone so that it fulfills their expectations.
Similarly, even sites that do contain the right information may have issues with formatting or navigation. If your site is complex and confusing to a first-time reader, they may not take the time to sort it all out. You need to find ways to adjust your content to make it more accessible to them. Don’t just trust that having the right facts on the page will get the job done. You also need content that is written in a helpful and useful manner.
Poor Keywords Increase Bounce Rate
Another potential issue is that you’ve optimized well for keywords that are getting a lot of traffic, but they are simply not the right keywords for your actual audience. People come to your site expecting something entirely different than what you’ve offered. They’re quickly frustrated when they begin to look at the site, and the bounce rate reflects that. This could mean adjusting your keywords and focusing more on relevancy so that, even if your overall traffic levels fall, you actually attract the type of reader who wants to be on that page and who will find value there.
Updating Your Site to Improve Bounce Rate
As you can see, there are a lot of things to learn from a bounce rate and dramatic ways you can improve your site. Just get in touch with us at Content Customs to get the process started.
