Bounce rate represents the number of visitors who enter a site and leave without viewing any other pages. There are two main reasons for a high rate:

A) Traffic is being misdirected to your site.
B) Viewers who have navigated correctly to your site found exactly what they were looking for. For example, lets say your website is http://www.metmuseum.org, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A visitor looking for hours of operation would find that information on the homepage. That might cause them to exit immediately. This would lead to a high bounce rate. In this case, when assessing your analytics, you would likely notice that the high bounce rate was accompanied by a large number of Unique Visitors.

Room for Improvement
If you can effectively lower your bounce rate, you will increase your viewer’s engagement, likely leading to higher conversion rates. Here are a few tips:

1. Better Design – There are simply too many well-designed sites to compete with. Good design is the standard, not the exception, and an increasing number of web savvy viewers just won’t wade through a poorly constructed site. Navigation must be clear allowing users to easily find the information.
2. Speed – Be mindful of site download times. Internet users have short attention spans and will most likely bail after 10 seconds.
3. Lose the Autoplay – Sites that feature music or video playing automatically will distract the viewer from the experience and often cause an immediate exit.
4. Legibility – Make sure that text isn’t too small (e.g., 11pt or lower) or is high contrast (e.g., black type on a white background). If a user has to strain their eyes they are very likely to leave.
5. Content – Creative, interesting and grammatically correct content is always appealing. Original content with set you apart from the competition. Also make sure that you write to the average reader in your target audience.

While a low bounce rate isn’t everything, it can be a significant factor in determining whether you are meeting your online marketing goals. Consider these 5 simple tips the beginning of your journey to a fully optimized site.