How To Reduce High Bounce Rates of Websites?	Visited: 1096 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kabir Bedi July 17, 2009

All websites seek high volumes of visitor traffic. But what takes away the joy of having hundreds and thousands of incoming visitors? Simple – The same visitors going away without doing anything. They just seem to 'bounce' out of the website.

This is defines as the bounce rate i.e. the percentage of visitors who leave the website directly from the same page they enter without clicking through any other page. High bounce rates mean less conversion and thus low revenue. Thus, it is very important to fix the flaws and make sure bounce rates are at the minimum. Here are some potential causes of high bounce rates and ways to solve them.

Poor Website Design and Usability

First impressions make a lot of difference. If visitors enter your website and finds it all cluttered and clamped, they will feel rather uncomfortable and leave instead of exploring further. Likewise, if they have to spend a lot of time understanding your website or comprehending its features, they will ultimately get frustrated and make a move. Therefore, it is very important to have a website that is not only pleasant looking but also functions seamlessly. Visitors should feel welcome on the website and be able to browse through very easily. Intuitive navigation is the key to rich user experience.

Irrelevant Content

The content of your website should be high on information and value. They should offer some value addition to your audiences and provoke them to read further. In addition to rich information, the writing style should be such that visitors ask 'What's next?' Make sure you have well written content and guide your visitors to perform desired actions on your website.

Inconsistent Navigation

As mentioned earlier, well designed navigation system is the key to rich user experience. Similarly, poor navigation structure only serves to frustrate the visitors and make them leave. Navigation issues are one of the most common reasons for high bounce rates on websites. For your visitors to explore your website and move around easily, they need a consistent and intuitive navigation pathway.

Wrong Selection of Keywords

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are major traffic generation avenues. And both the process depend on keywords and their popularization. While the right selection of keywords would get you your niche audiences, the wrong keywords can do just the opposite. Even though visitors come to your website, they will leave as soon as they realize there is nothing that they actually wanted.

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

The page titles are the title of the contents of the web page. Similarly, the meta descriptions describe the contents of the websites. Wrong choice of keywords would further result in wrong definition of the contents and the titles of the same. And search engines display the page titles and meta descriptions in the organic search results snippets. If there is no consistency between the page titles and descriptions and the actual contents of the web pages, there are bound to be high bounce rates.