When it comes to running a successful website, few things are as important as the bounce rate. This metric is the percentage of visitors who leave your website without navigating to another page. Having a high BR hurts your site's search engine results page ranking because it tells search engines that your website isn't compelling enough for visitors to stick around. As a result, search engines rank sites with lower BRs ahead of yours.

However, what is considered a high bounce rate? Not everyone agrees on the threshold for a high BR. In general, most search engines consider a BR between 70% and 80% to be poor. On the other hand, a BR between 30% and 50% is considered excellent. When you have anything much lower than 30%, it's probably a tracking error.

If your BR is higher than 70%, you might want to think of ways to reduce it. Here are a few tips that can reduce your BR and boost your ranking.

Speed Up Your Website's Load Time

Most people who surf the internet aren't very patient. If a webpage takes too long to load, they'll likely leave before it ever finishes. Unfortunately, this still hurts your BR. That's why it's important to take steps to decrease your website's load time.

On a side note, studies show that slow-loading pages rank among the chief reasons why consumers abandon their online shopping carts. Missing out on these potential sales can make or break a company.

One way to make your website load faster is to limit picture sizes. The bigger a picture is, the more time it takes to load. In turn, your visitors have to wait longer to see the page. On average, about 50% of internet users only wait about two seconds for a website to load before they leave. Thus, reducing your site's load time is crucial when you want to improve SEO.

Post High-Quality Content

When trying to reach SEO goals, it's important to remember that content is king. The better content that you post, the more likely that people are to visit your site and hang around for a bit. Consequently, the BR will improve.

Consider writing or hiring someone to write blogs for your website. Blogs are a great way to not only work keywords into your site and improve local SEO but also to add quality content. When writing a blog, though, make sure that the content is related to your website. Doing so will ensure that search engines rank your website with the right keywords.

Pay for Traffic

Paying for traffic is a fantastic way to increase your website conversion rate and improve BR at the same time. When you pay for traffic, you put the power into your own hands. You can create custom campaigns using keywords that you choose. Then, the bots will visit your site while searching for those keywords, increasing your rank on search engine results pages.

Likewise, you can customize your campaign to ensure that the bots visit multiple pages on your website. Doing so will reduce your bounce rate, effectively ranking you even higher on search engines. Furthermore, you can have the bots click on specific links to your site in order to increase your CTR. Since search engines, such as Google, take click-through-rate into account, improving it can only raise your overall ranking.