Why Your Website Can Have A High Bounce Rate?

Are your bounce rates high? Learn the reasons behind your high bounce rate and get advice on how to lower it.

You may have even questioned it to yourself. Heck, it might even be the query that led you to this post. There is no “ideal” bounce rate, no matter what brought you here. However, a high one isn’t exactly what you desire.

Bounce Rate: What Is It?

Recall that a “bounce” is defined by Google as “a single-page session on your site.” The percentage of visitors to your website that leave after only reading one page is referred to as your bounce rate. Even when a user is inactive on a page for longer than 30 minutes, this is a possibility. What exactly is a high bounce rate, and why is it undesirable? Well, “high bounce rate” is a relative word that depends on the objectives of your business and the nature of your website. Low bounce rates are also a potential issue.

According to Semrush data, the average bounce rate is between 41% and 55%, with a range between 26% and 40% being ideal, and anything over 46% being deemed “excessive.”

How to Check Your Google Analytics Bounce Rate

The bounce rate as we know it appears to no longer exist in Google Analytics 4. The audience overview tab in Universal Analytics is where you can get the overall bounce rate for your website.

If that describes your company, you might be thinking, “Where did the bounce rate go?”

You are not seeing things; Google really did delete the bounce rate. Or rather, they took its position and replaced it with “engagement rate,” a better and newer metric. Go to Acquisition > User acquisition or Acquisition > Traffic acquisition in GA4 to check your site’s bounce rate engagement rate.

Some of the problems with bounce rate as a measure have been resolved by engagement rate. One is that it takes into account sessions when a visitor converted or stayed on the page for at least 10 seconds even if they did not visit any other pages, two types of sessions that were not previously taken into account.

As a result, you ought to witness a decrease in your bounce rate in GA4. That is, once you do a little math. Simply deduct your engagement rate from 100% to determine your new bounce rate.

It pushes us to concentrate on the positive: How many people are accessing your site; rather than the negative. It’s also a more current, accurate metric. Back to the topic you were looking for: the causes of your high bounce rate and solutions.

A Few Pages’ Disproportionate Contribution

Using the preceding section’s example as an example, it’s possible that some of your site’s pages are contributing disproportionately to the overall bounce rate of your website.

Google is skilled at distinguishing between these. Your longer-form content pages should have a lower bounce rate if your single CTA landing pages reasonably satisfy user intent and cause users to bounce soon after performing an action. To be sure that this is the case, or to determine whether any of these pages with a greater bounce rate shouldn’t be driving users away in droves, you need look further.

Get Google Analytics open. Sort the landing pages by bounce rate under Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

Think about including a sophisticated filter to eliminate pages that might bias the results.

For instance, obsessing about the single Twitter share that generated five visits and had all of your social UTM parameters appended to the URL’s end isn’t always beneficial.

Determine a minimal threshold of volume that is significant for the page is my general rule of thumb.

Select the number of visits that makes sense for your website—100 or 1,000 visits—then select Advanced and the Sessions more than that filter.

To access Acquisition > User Acquisition or Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition in GA4, click the appropriate link. the report title, and then select “Add filter +” from the menu.

Select “Session default channel grouping” (also known as “Session medium” or “Session source / medium” etc.) to create a filter. Then, under the Dimension values menu, select the “Organic Search” checkbox.

Activate the Apply button in blue. Click the blue plus sign to reveal a new option when you’re back in the report.

Select Landing page under Page/screen in the menu.

Technical or Blank Page Error

If visitors are leaving the page after only a few seconds and your bounce rate is unusually high, your page is probably blank, producing a 404, or otherwise not loading properly.

Examine the page using the most common browser and device settings used by your audience (such as Chrome on mobile, Safari on desktop, etc.) to simulate their experience.

To learn about the problem from Google’s standpoint, you can also check in Search Console under Coverage. If you can, fix the problem yourself or seek assistance from someone who can; otherwise, Google may quickly remove your page from the search results.

From a bad website link

Even if you are doing everything correctly on your end to obtain a normal or low bounce rate from organic search results, your referral traffic may still have a high bounce rate. You might be receiving unqualified visitors from the referring website, or the anchor text and link context might be deceptive.

This can occasionally happen as a result of poor copywriting. The author or publisher either placed the link to your website in the wrong place in the material or didn’t intend for it to be there at all. First, get in touch with the article’s author.

You can escalate the problem to the site’s editor or webmaster if they don’t reply or are unable to amend the article after it has been published. Ask them politely to change the context or delete the connection to your website, if appropriate. Unfortunately, it’s possible that the referring website is intentionally or accidentally attempting to harm your SEO efforts.

Even though you should still contact them and kindly request that they take down the link, you should occasionally update your disavow file in Search Console. Although disavowing the link won’t lower your bounce rate, it will inform Google not to include the link when evaluating the value and relevancy of your website.

Slow-Loading Page

Particularly as part of the Core Web Vitals initiative, Google has redoubled its efforts to improve site speed. The bounce rate can be severely impacted by a page that loads slowly. A factor in Google’s ranking formula is site speed. It has always been. Google aims to encourage material that gives consumers a good experience, and they are aware that a slow site might do just that.

Users want the information quickly, which is one of the reasons Google has worked so hard on highlighted snippets. If it takes more than a few seconds for your page to load, your visitors can feel impatient and depart. For most SEO and marketing professionals, improving site speed is a lifelong endeavour.

The good news is that you should experience a gradual increase in speed with each incremental repair. Using tools like these, check the overall and per-page speeds of your pages:

• Google PageSpeed Insights.
• Google Search Console PageSpeed reports.
• Pingdom.
• GTmetrix.
• Lighthouse reports.

They’ll provide you advice tailored to your website, such as compressing your graphics, limiting the use of third-party scripts, and making the most of browser caching.

Misleading meta description or title tag

Do your title tag and meta description adequately convey the information on your page? If not, people may land on your website believing it to be about one thing only to discover it isn’t, leading them to leave and return to their original location.

Fortunately, this is an easy problem to rectify, whether it was a mistake or you were trying to manipulate the system by optimising for clickbait keywords.

Either review the information on your page and make the necessary changes to the title tag and meta description. Alternately, modify the article to respond to the search terms you wish to draw visitors from.

Additionally, you can see what sort of meta description Google automatically created for your website for popular queries – Google has the right to alter your meta description, and if they do, you have the option of correcting the situation.

Self-Contained Content

Occasionally, your material is so effective that readers may swiftly find what they need and move on. This has the potential to be great.

Maybe you succeeded in the content marketer’s goal and produced amazing material that completely absorbed them for a short period of time. Or maybe you have a landing page that merely asks visitors to fill out a brief lead form.

You should check the Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration data in Google Analytics to see if bounce rate is unimportant. A/B testing and user experience testing can also be used to determine whether the high bounce rate is a problem.

Spending two minutes or more on the page indicates to Google that the user found your page to be extremely relevant to their search query. Such user intent is invaluable if you want to rank for that particular search query.

Consider persuading the reader to read some of your related blog posts after filling out the form if the user is spending less than a minute on the page (which may be the case with a well optimised landing page with a quick-hit CTA form).

In this case, GA4’s engagement rate might be a more useful metric than UA’s bounce rate. In GA4, a session of this nature would not be considered a bounce but rather as “engaged.”

Bad UX

Do you constantly annoy customers with advertisements, pop-up polls, and email subscription buttons? These CTA-heavy features may be appealing to the marketing and sales staff, but if you use too many of them, visitors may leave your website.

Google’s Core Web Vitals are all about the user experience; in addition to being ranking considerations, they also have an effect on how satisfied your site’s visitors are. Is it difficult to navigate your website?

Perhaps your visitors want to explore further, but your blog doesn’t have a search box, or using a smartphone to click the menu items is challenging. We understand our websites inside and out as internet marketers.

It’s simple to overlook that what seems obvious to us may not make sense to others. A web or UX designer should assess your site and let you know if anything stands out to them as problematic, so be sure you’re not making these frequent design blunders.

The website isn’t optimised for mobile

Although SEOs are aware of the value of having a mobile-friendly website, the concept isn’t always put into effect in the real world. Even though Google first announced its shift to mobile-first indexing in 2017, many websites are still not what would be termed mobile-friendly today.

On mobile devices, websites that have not been optimised for mobile display poorly and take a while to load. That will guarantee a high bounce rate. Even though responsive design concepts were used to create your website, it’s still possible that the live page doesn’t appear to be user-friendly on mobile devices.

Some of the important content may occasionally move below the fold when a page is condensed for mobile consumption. Now, mobile customers simply see the navigation menu on your website instead of a headline that matches what they saw in their search.
In the event that the page doesn’t provide what they require, they return to Google.

Test a page on your smartphone if it has a high bounce rate but no obvious problems stand out to you. Additionally, you can check Google Search Console and Lighthouse for mobile issues.

Poorly written or poorly optimised content

Your website’s visitors may be leaving quickly due of the poor quality of your material. Examine your page very carefully, then have your most critical and truthful friend or coworker look it through.

Your material can be excellent, but you haven’t optimised it for online reading or for the audience you’re trying to reach.

1. Does it provide clear answers to queries?
2. Is it scannable despite having numerous header tags?
3. Do you use simple sentences when writing?

Writing for the internet is different from writing for print media.
To enhance the amount of time individuals spend reading your material, sharpen your online copywriting abilities.

The other alternative is that your writing is generally subpar or that your audience doesn’t care about your material. Think about working with a freelance copywriter or content strategist who can assist you in converting your thoughts into persuasive content.

Depth of Content

Through knowledge panels and featured snippets, Google can provide individuals with rapid answers; you can go one step further by providing people with in-depth, fascinating content that is connected to other pieces of information.

Make sure your content, if it makes sense, encourages visitors to click to explore other pages on your website. Give them a cause to stay by including engaging, pertinent internal links. Give a TL;DR summary at the start for the group of people who only want the quick response.

Another situation where the engagement rate of GA4 can be preferable to the bounce rate of UA. People will continue reading your material after the first 10 seconds if it is compelling enough, which will cause GA4 to classify their session as “engaged” rather than a bounce.

Affiliate Landing Page Or Single-Page Site

If you’re an affiliate, the sole purpose of your page can be to purposefully direct visitors to the merchant’s website rather than your own. If the page has a greater bounce rate in these situations, you’re performing your job effectively. A similar situation would arise if you had a single-page website, such as a landing page for your ebook or a straightforward portfolio site.

Since there is nowhere else to go, it is typical for such sites to have an extremely high bounce rate. Even if a user’s inquiry is answered very fast, keep in mind that Google can typically identify whether a website is doing a good job satisfying user intent.

If you’re interested, you can change your bounce rate to better suit the objectives of your website. You can modify your analytics settings for Single Page Apps (or SPAs) to see various sections of a page as separate pages, changing the bounce rate to more accurately reflect the user experience.

This is another instance where GA4’s engagement rate may be a better metric than UA’s bounce rate. This kind of session would not qualify as a bounce and would instead count as “engaged” if you had set it up so that a click on your affiliate link is regarded as a conversion event.

Bonus

Your user doesn’t trust you yet, so don’t ask for their credit card information, social security number, grandmother’s pension, or children’s names straight away. Given the prevalence of fraudulent websites, people are prepared to be wary.

Many individuals will leave the page right away when they encounter a large pop-up requesting for information. It’s your responsibility to earn your visitors’ trust. You’ll both be happier if you do this.

You’ll have a lower bounce rate because your visitor will think you’re trustworthy. Google likes it either way if it pleases people.

Make sure your writing is clear:

• Give your text a lot of white space to breathe.
• Add supplementary pictures.
• Use concise language.
• Your friend is spell check.
• Make use of a nice, tidy design.
• Don’t burden visitors with advertisements.

Keep important details above the fold.

On occasion, your content reflects what your title tag and meta description promote. Simply put, it’s not obvious to your visitors at first glance.
People form a first opinion as soon as they land on a website.

You want whatever they imagined they were going to see when they arrived to be confirmed by that first impression. The title they read on Google should be reflected in an obvious H1.

If it’s an online store, the product photo should correspond to the description they found on Google. Ensure that pop-ups or adverts don’t cover up these components.

Accelerate Your Site

Faster is always preferable when it comes to SEO. A chore that should always be at the top of your SEO to-do list is maintaining site speed. There will always be fresh approaches to speed up load times through optimization and compression. Until then, remember to:

• Before uploading any photographs to your website, compress them all, and only utilise the largest display size required.
• Review and remove any plugins, stylesheets, or scripts that are external or resource-intensive. Remove any that you don’t require if there are any.
• Check to see if there is a quicker option for the ones you do require. Get down to business: Set up browser caching, minify JavaScript and CSS, and use a CDN.
• Look at Lighthouse for more recommendations.

Conclusion

Bear in mind that bounce rates are only one statistic. The world is not over just because there is a high bounce rate. High bounce rates are common on some functional, well-designed websites, and that’s fine. The effectiveness of your site can be gauged by its bounce rates, but it’s important to keep them in perspective.

You should now have a clear understanding of what’s generating your high bounce rate after reading this post. Make your website quick, user-friendly, and valuable since good users are drawn to good websites.