If people are coming to your website and leaving without surfing through your content you can end up with a high bounce rate.
This means that your content isn’t relevant to what they want or they are having a bad experience on your site. A high bounce rate lowers the traffic you will get from Google. This is an important thing to know because you can now do something about it.
What an acceptable bounce rate is varies but generally if you can get below 45% you are doing well. Try to be at 55% or less anyway. The general interpretation of bounce is that; if you can engage a user for more than 10 seconds you are doing something right.
Causes of bounce rates can be from having boring content, ugly website, too much flash, too long to load, low up time, and mismanaged tagging with irrelevant content.
How to get Lower Bounce Rate Now!
Load time is especially important with more and more users using mobile devices for much of their web surfing.
If you are using WordPress and are using every cute and cool plugin offered, that can be a big problem. There are lots of plugins you don’t really need. You can verify your CPU usage through your hosting company.
If you are using a cluttered shared server or a ‘free’ website that came with your phone – these too may be slowing you down.
To encourage people to visit a site for longer you can give a person a reason to click through to another page by saying “more info” or put an arrow at the top and say “scroll down to see the surprise photo”. Make it worth their while though so they will be happy when they get there.
Reduce loading times by hosting your images on CDN and/or reduce their size to max at 232px and 72px.
Avoid using popups that hijack your visitors senses. This can cause many people to turn away and never come back as well as increase load time.
When linking to other content, unless the reason for your page was to link out to a product, then try to keep the links inside the website.
