28 May
All your marketing efforts rely on how Google’s algorithm views your medical site. One of the many aspects that Google looks into your medical site is its bounce rate. Accepting that your medical site has a high bounce rate can be quite surprising if you think you put your best efforts to market it and design it.
Yet when you head into Google Analytics to check the numbers, your bounce rate recounts are another story. Your medical site thrives on how much people visit your site and how long they spend on it. An online visit is only beneficial if it is long enough for the Google algorithm to recognize it as one.
And that only happens if it is for an extended amount of time. Putting things into perspective, a bounce rate is the number of online visitors that clicked on your medical site and left without spending any time on it. Google’s algorithm ranks sites based on their bounce rates. It can be said that a bounce rate holds just as much impact for a site as its SEO or content.
Does Having A High Bounce Rate Negatively Affect Your Site?
Having a high bounce rate doesn’t just impact your site, it impacts it negatively. Google is known to rank sites with high bounce rates, way down the SERP funnel. A high bounce rate is anything between 50 – 70%. By getting moved down ranks, your site won’t be available to your targeted patients and your SEO measures would go down the drain.
According to Google, the bounce rates usually follow as:
- 26-40%: Excellent, the site is performing well.
- 41-55%: Average, more attempts can be made to improve.
- 56-70%: High, the site needs a thorough examination.
- 70% or higher: Awful, the site needs to be re-evaluated or reconstructed.
10 Reasons For A High Bounce Rate Of A Medical Site
Learning just about high bounce rates is not enough. Once discovering that your medical site does have a high bounce rate, it is important to identify what is the root cause for it. Your site can have a high bounce rate for the following 10 reasons:
1. Unoptimized Content
Your patients visit your medical site for your content. They might not choose to stay if it is of poor quality or unoptimized. This causes a high bounce rate. Making sure that your medical site has high-quality content that is optimized with keywords and links can keep your patients on your site and your bounce rate down.
2. Poor Loading Speed
What is considered worse than clickbait content? Slow and lagging sites. They also play a huge part in amping up a site’s bounce rate because visitors get frustrated and leave instantly. Google values sites that provide a good experience for their visitors and if your medical site has a slow loading speed, you might have a high bounce rate and Google won’t consider your site worth showing it to online traffic.
3. Hidden Faulty Pages
Let’s say your site looks good and it has fast loading speed and optimized content, however, it still has a high bounce rate. The culprit could be some hidden faulty pages that are behind it. Google will pick them out even if you can’t. Make sure to see that all your medical site’s pages are performing well and don’t have any broken links or spam pop-ups.
4. Unlinked Structure
To Google, a well-performing site is well-linked in terms of structure and performs smoothly if visitors choose to roam around and visit different pages of it. It is important to keep your medical site linked with all of its pages. Every page must be connected with a link to another page and doesn’t provide a dead-end for the visiting patients if they decide to roam around further. Not having a linked structure can result in a high bounce rate, as well.
5. Misleading Titles And Meta Description
Have you ever wondered what Google hates the most? Clickbait and misleading titles. If a patient clicks on your medical site expecting to learn about “Colonoscopy: Explained” because of your meta description and your page is about your medical services, they will get irritated and leave right away. The result? High bounce rates.
6. Unprofessional Site Design and Graphics
Your website and graphics speak for its certification. If it’s messy and congested, patients won’t bother staying on it, even if you offer great medical services. Adding lots of pointless pictures can cause your visiting patients to click off. Try to keep it simple yet guiding, leading the patients to spend more time on it by catching their interest with high-quality graphics and proper site design.
7. Faulty Backlinks From Spam Sites
Your medical site’s backlink structure creates its background. If you employ spammy links to dodgy sites, the visiting patients will consider your medical site to be spam as well and all your marketing efforts will crumble. Links to spammy sites are a big reason for sites to have high bounce.
8. Irritating Pop-Ups
Like spammy links but more annoying, pop-up ads that flood a site’s page whenever someone clicks on it are a big reason for its high bounce rates. Ensure your medical site doesn’t have pop-ads and if it does, it doesn’t flood the patient’s screen when they visit your site.
9. Confusing Call-To-Actions Prompts
Oftentimes, sites with confusing CTAs drive their visiting traffic to click on them because they get confused and a potential lead is lost. Any diverting components or misplaced CTAs can diminish the validity of your medical site, which can cause patients to click off and go look for another alternative. Make sure your CTAs are correctly placed and have the potential of catching leads instead of driving them off and amping up your bounce rates.
10. Difficult To Reach Content
A high-quality site doesn’t make its visitors work for its content. By adding heading and subheading and clear and precise medical content on your site, you are ensuring that visiting patients will stay longer on your site and become more invested in it. Make sure that your medical content is easy to find and engaging enough so your visiting patients don’t click off.
The Lower The Bounce Rate, The Higher The SERP Position
Keeping your online medical website design to be performing at its utmost is already a cumbersome task and if it suddenly shows high bounce rates, you can count on its ranking to fall down. Keeping a track of your medical site’s components that have an effect on its bounce rates is a smart way of ensuring its ranking on SERPs and staying on the positive side of Google’s algorithm.
