How to Improve Bounce Rate

In the last article, I had covered What is bounce Rate and What might be acceptable bounce rate for your website, now in this article I will be covering What causes high bounce rate for your website and how can you improve it to make more number of visitors stay on your site.

Here are some of the most common reasons for having high bounce rate –

1. Heavy adsense usage – If you use adsense, then you will always lose traffic when the visitor click on the ads, now suppose if you have a CTR of 5% then you are losing that much traffic to adsense. Ideally you may want to keep a balance between adsense and user experience as too many ads often result in bad user experience.

2. Poor Navigation – Poor navigation is another reason of having high bounce rate. On average, most of the sites get 50%+ traffic from search engines so if you don’t put proper navigation the chances are after reading the article, the visitor will close the page/tab. That is why it is often suggested to always have related or suggested links at the bottom of every article as well as linking to other pages from the body of page.

3. Social Media Traffic – Social Media Traffic from digg and stumbleupon don’t convert well at all as most of them are curiosity clicks. People will come, read the content and will move away. So if your site is getting very high social media traffic, then the chances are your site also might be having very high bounce rate.

4. Poor Quality Content – If the content is poor then the visitor will obviously navigate away from the page without going on to other pages. Most of the MFA’s (Made for adsense sites) are a prime example of Poor Content + lot of ads hence such sites gets very high bounce rate (not that that the owners are really concerned about it anyway) so may be if you are having high bounce rate, you may want to improves the relevancy of content.

5. 1 page sites, sales letters or Blogs – 1 page sales letters, mini websites and blogs will always have high bounce rate. Though in blogs you can, as said earlier, keep related links block so the user can browse to other pages too.

6. Slow loading of site – If the site is loading very slowly, then too the user may browse away Its good time to start using Firebug and YSlow to find such problems and to make your site load faster.

I guess this pretty much summarizes the “why your site has high bounce rate” and “what can you do reduce bounce rate” points. In the end, it is you, who has to keep the balance between user experience, quality of content, traffic and revenue.

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Other Related posts:

1. What is a good Bounce Rate ?
2. SEO Test - How Google Slowly ranks Pages after Hours and in a Week
3. Stop Building websites for Adsense
4. Why websites built solely for adsense fails ?