Bounce rate is too high! SEO not working

[dtonmoy]

Hi guys, I run a Website development service based Website. It's an Australian Website. I'm having roughly 200-250 visitors per week. But the bonce rate is too high, nearly 90%! Would you suggest me to lower the bounce rate? I am also not getting enough queries from the website. Doing SEO for nearly 8 months by myself. But it isn't working! Help please!

[jediviper]

Well your post is very generic, as also your assumption. We don't know what SEO tasks have u managed, so noone can give u a straight answer.
Also how many of your pages get such a high bounce rate? If it's for the majority of your pages, than there is something wrong all over your website and you will have to reconsider the user experience.

[tangor]

Address all ordinary basics first:

Site speed, time to load, layout, presentation, good content (compelling and unique, not cookie cutter stuff), and how many third party things are utilized.

Is site static, dynamic, or a CMS of some kind?

What does your backlink profile look like?

Any errors being reported, first in you own logs, second on any webmaster tools console (if used)?

Users have the attention span of a gnat, so you have to have something to get their attention the instant the page is fully loaded (about 2 seconds of attention span!).

Then you fiddle with SEO.

[Dimitri]

Bounce rate is one thing, time on site is another. How long are people staying on your site?

Additionally, high bounce rate can suggest that the content of the page is uninteresting, or not the kind the visitors were expecting, when they clicked to visit your site. Beside the short attention span, keep in my mind that most people will not really read the page, but scan it. If the page layout is too confusion, and not enough clear and simple, people can miss the information easily, or don't bother "seek" this information.

[engine]

Additionally, high bounce rate can suggest that the content of the page is uninteresting, or not the kind the visitors were expecting, when they clicked to visit your site.

True.
It can also mean people found what they wanted and departed.

In short, yes, you don't want to lose visitors that reached your site.

The suggestions from the other members here are worth exploring.

[tangor]

@dtonmoy ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Please provide more info on your site setup, keeping in mind what is allowed under the forums TOS ... (no site names, no identifiable site structure, etc.)

Website, blog, cms? (Each are a bit different). Site niche (general) such as info, entertainment, ecommerce ...

[McMohan]

High Bounce rate is fine if the average time on the page is long enough.
If the article is long, give an abstract at the beginning, highlight important sentences in the article, embed infographics and videos if you have.

[farhansaeeddnp]

Check the following thing

1. Check Load time of web pages
2. Check that you are targeting the right keywords
3. may your audience does not find the right content on your site
4. add some internal link on it,

Get hotjar trial which is free, implement it and see the recoding to analyze user behavior. Get result and done chainging on it.

[dtonmoy]

@tangor I have to admit that the site speed is a bit on the slower side. But not that drastically slow. It opens within 4-6 seconds (depending on the location). It has unique content and I'm not sure about the presentation and UI. How about you suggest me about the UI and presentation.
Yes, many plugins are installed on the site. It's a WP site. I can see that there are 90 backlinks listed. Webmaster tool is clear, with no error.

[dtonmoy]

Website, blog, cms? (Each are a bit different). Site niche (general) such as info, entertainment, ecommerce ...

It's a service-based website. We provide web dev, <specific technical> solutions and we're based in <snipped location>.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:19 pm (utc) on Oct 13, 2019]
[edit reason] Some specifics got too specific. Details beyond "general" are not needed. [/edit]

[dtonmoy]

@ritzgupta yes, rich looking images are what we lack. I think site content is on the good side.

[tangor]

@tangor I have to admit that the site speed is a bit on the slower side. But not that drastically slow. It opens within 4-6 seconds (depending on the location).

Sorry to say ... 4-6 seconds is a deal breaker for the general user (most of which are on phones and already impatient).

You indicated a lot of "plugins" ... you might want to reduce that activity to the barest necessary as each one will add drag time on the site. If any of those plugins are for site analysis or reporting, ditch those and do that research off site via your raw access logs, which will give a more concise and accurate result than these "se-linked" tools.

Make sure any and all images are optimized for display/speed ... in most cases these are stumbling blocks few consider.

Keep your WP database optimized! Delete earlier iterations of articles and optimize, compress and compact your data! Speed gains can be enormous. Other opinions in that regard might come.

Keep any JS to the bare minimum, but use what is needed to make the site functional.

Page speed is one of over 200 things ... but it is probably the most immediate and one you can do much to address.

[Robert Charlton]

dtonmoy, in particular, check your image file sizes. In my experience, image file size is the most common problem with regard to load speed.

How about you suggest me about the UI and presentation.

This is not possible without a site review, which we do not allow in public areas of the forum. I suggest you get some friends to try your site and watch what they do. User hesitation that suggests they're confused by page layout or design or wording needs to be fixed. Also, use site search here to find look for specific topics.

[dtonmoy]

From the last 5-6 months, my website is stuck in the same position (pos 11-12) for local search. I know the real battle begins from here. What are the most effective ways to improve my site's ranking and bring it to the first page?
I just need local ranking, not global. Done all the local listing. On-page SEO is done pretty accurately. Now what should I do most to bring it to the first page?

[edited by: not2easy at 5:19 pm (utc) on Oct 13, 2019]
[edit reason] Thread splice cleanup [/edit]

[not2easy]

In your first post you mention

I'm having roughly 200-250 visitors per week.

and there is no mention of where this number is from. Are you using something like Google Analytics or Matomo scripts to determine this number, are you examining the access logs or how do you see your visitor numbers and know that the bounce rate is that high? I do not doubt that it is possible, only wondering about the source because accuracy can vary. Recommendations can be more useful if we understand the environment.

[lucy24]

Looking back at the first post, I can't help thinking that the problem is not that SEO isn't working. It's that it is working too well, with the result that search engines are sending people who take one look at a page and instantly decide it isn't what they need.

That's assuming you have the kind of site where people stick around. (And isn't that fun? Once in a while I get a human visitor who views so many pages, it triggers my log handler's “make sure this isn’t a robot” flag.) If they're looking for the answer to some specific question, and their landing page answers that question, then the site has served its purpose.

[skaterpunk]

That's assuming you have the kind of site where people stick around. If they're looking for the answer to some specific question, and their landing page answers that question, then the site has served its purpose.

Exactly, in some scenarios. Bounce rate doesn't matter to me as my articles are created to answer very specific questions. I don't expect a reader to get their answer and then decide to move onto more articles, unless a linked related article is also interesting and helpful in the moment.

However, time on page is a more useful metric, for me.

[NickMNS]

However, time on page is a more useful metric, for me.

This is true, but the problem is that if the user doesn't do anything other than go back or or close the tab then the time on site recorded by Google Analytics (and other tracking software) will be 00:00:00. For this reason, in GA specifically, average time on page only counts the page views where the users did not bounce. This makes the metric very unreliable. You could get around this by setting up timer based events that trigger after say 30 seconds or a minute. Like that if the user is still on the page after 30 seconds the event is triggered but if the user leaves before then not.

This will "artificially" reduce the bounce rate. Artificially is in quotes, because getting this type of feedback may be the goal. On the other hand, any astute observer would realize that you could reduce that timer to say 1 second and then trigger an event for every user. This would achieve the OP's goal of reducing the bounce rate, effectively setting it at 0. But I doubt it would serve any real purpose other than deluding oneself with rosy and misleading metrics.

[EditorialGuy]

It can also mean people found what they wanted and departed.

Or, in some cases, it could mean you don't have anything else on the topic that your visitors were researching.

Let's say you've got a site about dog breeds, with one page about Bearded Collies. Someone who's researching Bearded Collies may not be interested in your pages about Beagles, Boxers, and Bernese Mountain Dogs. If you have only one page about Bearded Collies, those "bearded collie" searchers aren't likely to stick around.

[2clean]

We don't know anything here about the type of page you are serving.

You can fix all the elements described here but it might have something to do with the nature of the interaction on your website, so I would start there.

I would look at whether or not you would expect the visitors to go beyond a single page visit. I would look at the elements on the page to see whether there are interactions that are not being logged that would, if sent to Google Analytics, give you a more accurate representation of your true bounce rate.

Google Tag Manager has a thing called "Non-interaction hit" which is a Google event that you can trigger and send to Google Analytics.

Here's an example:

You have web-page with a video on it, or a booking widget that is fired on AJAX. In the traditional GA visit/bounce rate a person arrives at the website and clicks on that video, or clicks on that AJAX widget and it fires - they watch the video, or they do something in the widget - and then they leave.

GA will tell you that the visitor has bounced even if they actually spent some time doing stuff on your website. While you could create a segment based on the time on site and isolate those visitors to get a sense of traffic value from a specific campaign, you would still be guessing (these visitors might have gone away to have a coffee!).

However, in Google Tag Manager you can set events against an interaction hit, when either the person clicks the button to play the video, or clicks the button on the AJAX button opener.

The really cool thing is that this click action can be used to tell Google the visitor did not bounce. It's like saying "if someone clicks my video it's as though they are interested in my website and I'm going to consider that good traffic".

Essentially if you wanted to you could model your bounce rate down to 0% but that might be pointless, but I'm sure blackhatters could find the value ;)

2clean.

[tangor]

Back to OP ..... and 90% bounce ... that sounds about average to me. :)

Users have the attention span of gnats.

If I get two page views from the same visitor CONSECUTIVELY I feel blessed! When I can figure out what triggered that extra view and then implement throughout the site, I have done my job.

YMMV

Raw logs rock!