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.