Reducing Your Bounce Rate: Why do Visitors Bounce?

You are overwhelmed with frustration as you scan across your website administration page. Business is good, but you are annoyed at your page bounce rate. It is not alarmingly high, but it is enough to be noticeable. Now you are going to spend the rest of your day wondering what the problem with your website may be.

The bounce rate is the number of visitors who exit your website almost as soon as they enter it. This number is not one of the more serious statistics pertaining to your website, but if it is relatively high, then you might need to re-evaluate some things.

Keeping readers on your website is the only way your website will be effective. There are several reasons that visitors may bounce from your site, and some of them are serious.

• A visitor had unintentionally opened your site, thinking that they were going somewhere else. While this might seem bad, this percentage of the bounce rate really can be ignored. They’re like the person who dials your number when trying to contact someone else: it was just an innocent misunderstanding.
• A visitor leaves because your website doesn’t meet their need, answer their question, carry the product they were searching for. This percentage of the bounce rate should concern you.  Are you using the correct keywords, or targeting the appropriate reader base?
• Upon typing in a phrase in Google, your site comes up at the top, but you still have a customer decide to leave immediately. You need to ask yourself if they left because or poor keyword choice on your part or a lack of clarity in the meta description for your company. A meta description that is vague or unclear will confuse and frustrate visitors, which will lead to a higher bounce rate.

It is never possible to tell with certainty why a customer decided to leave your site almost immediately after having arrived. However, by looking over the possible reasons for a customer deciding to go somewhere else after having been on your page for just a few seconds, several reasons might come to the forefront. If you see legitimate issues that need to be corrected, then make those changes.

If you see the bounce rate begin to decline, then you know that the changes solved the problem. If nothing happens, then you need to re-evaluate your website.

What steps have you taken to improve your bounce rate?