Many business owners and their marketing managers track how many people visit the company website and which pages get the most views. But these two metrics don’t tell the story that the often overlooked bounce rate does. Here is why a high bounce rate should concern you and how to fix the issue causing it.

What Is a Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate gives you a percentage of how many people visited one page of your company’s website and left immediately. It is an important metric that reveals a lot about the performance of your site. It also sheds light on whether or not your website contains relevant information that users want to read.

How Does it Affect my Business?

A high percentage of bounces lowers your SEO ranking. In addition, it shows you how much traffic is coming into your website but not staying to read your content. Both of these factors mean you lose leads and revenue that you could have won.

What Causes a High Bounce Rate?

Visitors quickly leaving your site could be caused by technical issues with your website. Pages filled with large images and lots of interactive text usually take more than two seconds to load, and that’s the amount of time most internet surfers are willing to wait. Server errors also can time out your page and send the potential visitor back to the original search page. Fixing these issues could solve your problem.

Bounces also happen when visitors can’t find what they are looking for on your homepage. To correct this, make sure your search box is located on the top right of your homepage and is easily identifiable. Also, check that your site navigation is simple to follow and that all links go to the correct pages.

The third cause of a high bounce rate is unimpressive or confusing content. If visitors don’t like the look of your page or the information on it, they will leave for another website. Making sure your site provides content your target audience wants to read and that it is presented clearly and attractively will fix this issue.

What Is a Low Bounce Rate?

A rate of 26% is considered an ideal bounce rate. However, anything below 40% is acceptable for most websites.

Resolving the issues causing visitors to leave your site quickly will increase your traffic and the time spent on your webpage. That should result in more leads and increased revenue.