Sep 13, 20214 min read

What Causes A High Bounce Rate?

A Lawyer SEO Guide On Website Bounce Rates

When you put in the effort to do Lawyer SEO, you don't just want people to click on your links and pages. Instead, you want site visitors to stick around, read your blog, go to your landing pages, and subscribe to your email lists. In short, you want conversions—not just traffic.

In this post, we'll talk about bounce rates. What it is, what it means for SEO, and what's causing people to leave your site immediately after clicking on links to it.

How Does Bounce Rate Work?

When a person hits one page on your site and then leaves without visiting another or interacting, this is known as a "bounce." The percentage that users bounced relative to your site traffic is known as the bounce rate.

Before you get too worked up about a high bounce rate, think about the type of website content you have. A blog with the primary objective of giving information could still be doing well. For example, readers come to the site, immediately get the information they need, and leave satisfied.

So don't worry about getting to a 0% bounce rate.

On the other hand, a really high bounce rate could indicate concerns. This is especially important if your goals include visitors interacting with your website and doing more than reading a single page.

What Does A High Bounce Rate Indicate?

High bounce rates can be caused by a lot of things. However, almost all the solutions have something to do with your Lawyer SEO strategy.

Let's look at the most common causes of high bounce rates:

1. Your Website Is Really Slow

When it comes to user experience, site visitors want their time on your website to be as smooth, fast, and enjoyable as possible. So if your website is taking really long to load images and text, it will start to frustrate people.

People are used to getting information and entertainment fast. So if your website isn't loading fast enough, they can always leave and find another law firm's website for the information they need.

Remember: Google released a site speed upgrade last year that influenced the mobile search ranks of the slowest sites on the internet, confirming the importance of mobile site speed.

There could be any number of reason why you're website is so slow compared to others. However, you can also do a quick look yourself or have a professional look it over for you.

You can try these options:

If you're not sure how to reduce your site's speed, ask a professional. They'll look into things like cache, CSS, and requests to determine any areas where improvements can be made.
Almost everyone working on a website may ensure that any photos they post are of reasonable file size. Large images are frequently a major contributor to slow site speed.

2. Unhelpful Content

Content can be unhelpful in two ways:

It's too short that it doesn't offer any helpful information.
It's too long and convoluted that non-lawyer audiences find it hard to digest.

You can produce the most fantastic piece of content your industry has ever seen. Still, if it's displayed as a single solid block of text, riddled with specialized terminology, or sprinkled with too many advertisements, people may be turned off from reading it.

Remember: The people looking for basic legal content are likely to be laypeople who aren't lawyers. Even if they knew something about the law, they're looking to you for more information to help them. Using legalese and other specialized language is just an unnecessary barrier to helping your site visitors.

3. Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly

Mobile devices have surpassed desktops as the most common internet browsing device. This means mobile accounts for more than half of all internet traffic. As a result, if your site isn't mobile-friendly, you risk losing a large portion of your audience, resulting in high bounce rates and low conversions.

Look at the report in your Google Analytics account under the 'Mobile' subsection of 'Audience,' where you can monitor bounce rates by device type to determine if your website is losing traffic, especially from mobile users.

If you're not sure your website is mobile-friendly, you may run a free test online, such as Google's mobile-friendly test. Of course, it's fantastic news if your website is mobile-friendly. If you find out that it's not, you might want to change or add to the design to make it so.

4. Your Site Has Poor Navigation

If you hadn't noticed, user experience accounts for a lot of the reasons why you're getting high bounce rates.

If a person gets to your website, appreciates the initial material, and decides to investigate what else you have to offer, they will most likely click on a link from the current page or use the menus. So even if you have great content but navigations are disorganized or not working, people might not be able to explore your site anyway.

Your bounce rate could rise if your menus are tough to browse and there are no links to other sites from the first page they visit. Again, this is true on both mobile and desktop.

Therefore, it's crucial to plan your navigation accordingly.

5. Misleading Titles And Meta Descriptions

When a user uses a search engine like Google, the title and meta description are the information that appears in the results.

Highlighted below is your meta description:

If what they see there doesn't match what's on your page, they're likely to leave in search of something more relevant. So it's crucial to write an appealing, catchy, and well-optimized title and meta description. Still, it should never deviate from conveying what the website is about.