Aside from technical considerations like page load times, one of the biggest contributing factors to high bounce rates is relevance – or more correctly, irrelevance.

Some website copywriters sprinkle their client's website with keywords in the hope of improving the site's search engine optimisation, only to serve content that is tangentially relevant to that query at best, or downright irrelevant to it at worst.

If the content you’re serving isn’t directly relevant to a user’s query, you can almost guarantee that they’re going to bounce. For this reason, it’s vital that you optimize for relevance above all other considerations.

Consider user intent when targeting keywords. Is the prospect looking to learn something, or buy something? What stage of the funnel are they in? What problem are they trying to solve? These are all questions that can help you provide the most useful, relevant content to your audience, and the more relevant your content is to users’ queries, the more likely they are to stick around once they’ve arrived on your site.