Bounce Rate

Definition: Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that leave the website directly from the page they enter without clicking through to any other page of the website.

Internal Factors

  1. Web Design and Usability: If your web design has problems this might make visitors to leave your website. You have to perform a number of usability tests to make sure your web design is user friendly.
  2. Website Content: The content is the most important fact. Make sure you have valuable content and information flow is good enough so that visitors can go from one page to another.
  3. Website Navigation: Users should be able to navigate in a clean way.
  4. Technical Issues: Make sure your website performs well without any bugs like php code instead of data.

External Factors

  1. Occasional Irrelevant Results from Search Engines: Sometimes search engines throw irrelevant results. If your website is one of those results then visitors will bounce off. The only thing you can do is to understand if you have unrelated keywords and investigate the reason on how SE are relating your website to those results.
  2. Improper External Link: If an external site links to your site using an anchor text that’s not related to your website, this link would drive traffic that come to your website with some expectations but would find different content.

Marketing Factors

  1. Wrong Keyword Selection: If you get non-targeted visitors (because you picked the wrong keywords) who are looking for something different they will leave.
  2. Ad Copy: Ad copies represent your website in the paid search results. If this representation is not aligned to what your website has to offer it is definitely going to boost up your bounce rate.
  3. Page Title and Meta Description: Search Engines typically display the Page Title and Meta description in the organic search result snippets. If the message in page Title and Meta description is not in line with the content of the page, high bounce rate is a big possibility.
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