In order to build the strongest online brand presence possible, you need to attract visitors and satisfy them. All too often, brands use a variety of marketing techniques and tricks that may attract visitors but can nevertheless backfire once those visitors arrive. Likewise, even a perfect brand presence can alienate select visitors based on a variety of technical mishaps and concerns. One big factor in attracting – and retaining – visitors is the dynamic surrounding your current bounce rates.

For those who are unaware, we’ll review what bounce rates are and why maintaining a low bounce rate is absolutely essential.

What Are Bounce Rates?

While some people understand all too well what bounce rates are, there are many who haven’t heard the term until now. In summary, your bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website prior to engaging with your content, links and offerings. In some cases, this can be due to a slow-loading page; in other cases, because you’re pinging URLs and content that is not relevant to what they need. Whatever the cause, bounce rates are indicative of the number of people who were not satisfied with your brand’s web presence in one way or another.

How They Indicate Irrelevance

Search engines are very skeptical of websites that develop high bounce rates over time. One of the main reasons for this skepticism is due to relevance. Because people who leave your website without doing anything very likely could not find what they were looking for, search engines view your website’s listing in relevant search results as a mistake in many cases. This can lead to lowered rankings over time if the problem isn’t corrected. As such, you may want to verify that the information you’re providing visitors with is relevant to the page and its advertising in search results.

How They Indicate Technical Issues

One of the biggest reasons why websites suddenly experience higher bounce rates relates to the technical structure of the website and/or hosting problems. Namely, page load speed is a huge component in determining how low or high bounce rates are for a website. In multiple studies, it has been shown that pages that take longer than two seconds to load begin to suffer from higher bounc rates. This is in part because mobile users are working with less bandwidth and therefore tend to be less patient when browsing from their devices.

Another Cause for High Bounce Rates

Bounce rates can be caused by other problems besides slow pages and content people find to be irrelevant. One notable example is 404 errors: when you migrate your website or change its URL structure, you might forget to correct some issues that cause pages not to load. When search engines send people to the same pages without proper redirects enabled, they’ll receive a 404 error. Always make sure that you’re pinging URLs correctly to search engines to avoid this problem.

Now that you’re familiar with what bounce rates are and what most commonly cause bounce rates to increase, you can be sure to correct these issues. If you’ve noticed higher bounce rates lately, do any of these potential trouble areas sound like they may be the culprit? Leave us a comment below and let us know how you intend to rectify the problem.