The entire point of creating, designing and maintaining a website is to attract people. Whether it’s for a personal blog or an online storefront, no website or blog can exist successfully without traffic. As sites grow and evolve, so does the amount of content flowing to it – but traffic alone isn’t a measurement of success.

Depending on what your goals are, a surge of traffic might produce no net benefit; if these visitors aren’t doing what you desire, then the value is questionable. In fact, there is some traffic that can actually be harmful to your visibility or success in search engine results pages and beyond.

Today, we’ll look at the concept of bounce rates and explain how you can reduce the occurrence of this negative indicator.

Don’t Be Cute

Historically, there was lots of misleading content on the web in search engine results. While entities such as Google have gotten much better at discerning intent, there are still some opportunities for people to mislead users. Unfortunately for them, this can still hurt their rankings substantially.

When using titles and meta descriptions to convey the meaning or context of a page – but not providing what the search users are looking for – this can inevitably lead to higher bounce rates for all relevant pages. The end result ends up being that you’re pinging noise at the target audience, which search engines will detect via the higher bounce rates. Ultimately, your rankings in these SERPs will decline.

Experiment

If higher bounce rates tend to be a problem on some pages but not others, then it’s obviously not a site-related issue. However, there may be specific reasons why select pages are experiencing these higher rates. In some cases, it may be that your page(s) are ranking well for terms when they are not particularly relevant to the audience. Another issue could be that the content in question – or the way it is presented – is simply turning off more people.

As a result, it’s crucial that you experiment with page and content formats. By conducting a bit of A/B testing, you can inevitably discover which elements may be the cause for these higher rates.

Improve Speed

Now more than ever, people are impatient. With faster internet connections at home and more people using mobile devices on the go, speed truly matters. Even if you’re ranking well in select SERPs, your bounce rates could be due to slow loading pages. There are many ways you can begin optimizing your website and its pages for maximum speed; some are as simple as compressing images and removing unnecessary plugins. If your page speed is too slow, then many will inevitably leave your website and look elsewhere.

If you’re trying to avoid pinging noise at your target audience, then reducing bounce rates is crucial. Not only does it indicate that you’re losing people, but it says the same thing to search engines. By improving page speed, experimenting with formats and being honest about the content you’re presenting, you can easily lower these rates and ultimately determine the exact cause.