As per Definition, Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits, when a visitors lands on your blog post and leave the same page without visiting any other page. Thus Maintaining it low is good for your site or blog. Nobody wants high bounce rate of his website because it leads to decrease Pageviews, unique visitors, less visibility in search results and also less revenue generated. Although Google Panda doesn’t like High Bounce rate of any website. So today we will discuss some effective ways to decrease our site Bounce Rate and Engage Audience. Note- To check your site Bounce rate please refer to Google Analytics.
Few factors that effect Bounce rate
Irrelevant content
Poor website navigation
No Internal Linking
Excessive use of pop-up’s
Bad blog design
Loading time
More distractions
Too many Redirection
15+ Great Tips on How to Decrease your Site Bounce Rate?
1. Blog Load Time
This is one of the most important factor in judging your site bounce rate. Hence your blog has minimum Loading time to keep bounce rate low. Its a fact that When a visitor lands on your blog, the first thing he notice is your blog’s loading time and design as well. So its must to reduce your site loading time to enjoy your readers to land on great pages in less time.
2. Make sure that External Links opens in new tab
After the invention of tabbed browsing in your favourite browser like Google chrome or Mozilla, its an great idea to open your external links in a new tab to make sure that your readers should not leave each by every page of your site that they opened. This trick guarantees reduce your site bounce rate to a great extent.
3. Internal Linking is must
This is one great factor which helps a lot to let your readers stay more into your Website. Try to interlink your blog post as much as you could just like Wikipedia. It also helps your site to boost in SERP’s and increase your web traffic too. Provide proper anchor text also to your important keywords when they hyperlinked in your blog post.
4. Unique and Quality Content
Nobody can ignore this fact that “Content is King”. Writing unique and quality content will make your website boost in search results plus it also makes believe your readers in your blog content. Now they will never skip or underestimate your content. Always be the first one to share some unique and quality post.
5. Site Design
Another great factor is your Blog Design. It should be awesome and easy to navigate. I recommend to Use quality themes and templates for your site to decrease your bounce rate. If you are a WordPress user then I must recommend you to use Thesis or Genesis Framework.
6. Easy to Read articles and Comment
Always Make sure that your readers can easily read out your blog posts by Avoiding pop-ups, external toolbars and anything similar to that which causes distractions to the visitors. Write articles in points and proper headings. If you won’t divide your articles in parts, it will be more like reading a newspaper. Also make sure that your readers can easy to comment via different platforms like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Open Id, url/name, WordPress and Anonymous too.
7. Take help of Related, Popular and featured Posts
Showing related posts helps a lot, once your reader is done reading the article, he should also wants to read more about the similar topic. You can use LinkWithin, nrelate widget for your Related posts. Same goes with Popular and Featured posts, displaying it will tells your readers about the most popular and trending blog posts at your site.
8. Proper Search Box
If you want to decrease your bounce rate in true manner it is highly recommended to place a Proper Search box at top of your sidebar. Visitors always prefer to search for articles they are looking for. Avoiding Search engine or Search box will make hard to find your blog articles.
9. Provide better Navigation
Your Blog’s navigation should be clean and prominent so it may not take your visitors to the wrong page which they never selected. Try to optimize your navigation for portable devices such as Mobiles, Tablet etc. You can also create a sitemap page for your blog where your readers can find all your articles at once.
10. More Ads are bad
The most common flaw which really triggers our bounce rate is Advertisements. You must know that more ads are bad for your blog as per visitors eye and Google panda too. Never place ads under pop-ups, emails etc. Also avoid ads that makes sound i.e play music and too much ads on your website that makes people trouble while surfing on your site. Maintain a balance of Ads at every section.
11. Give free downloads, giveaways, subscriptions and more
Now you can easily attract visitors to your site if you provide free downloads and giveaways like free themes, software’s, coupon codes, free wallpapers etc and so on. You can make them click on that link easily. Also offer them Subscriptions too to reduce bounce rate.
12. Optimize 404 Pages
Its a true fact that 404 Pages looks very ugly. That makes the bounce rate to bounce more. Your visitors will leave your site and look elsewhere for the information they were looking for. So optimize the error pages on your blog with the help of Providing some solutions and suggestions there. For ex- You can check Blogging Ways 404 Error page here.
13. Place back to top button on your blog
You might be seen back to top button at my blog, Sometimes your visitors after surfing a lot on your website reached to the bottom of the pages or post now from that they find hard to scroll and go back to top and that’s why they ultimately quite from your website or blog. Hence providing a back to top button to your site can helps you a lot and decrease your bounce ratio as well.
14. Insert beautiful Images in your post
Make sure that you have inserted useful and relevant images as per your post niche in your blog content. This is done to make good and style your post. Note- Sometimes images speaks more than just works.
15. Maintain Keyword Integrity
Always Make sure the keywords you are using in your metadata have low bounce rates and that you are reinforcing the term in the copy and content you are showing to site visitors. Your own brand or site name should have the lowest bounce rate for a keyword. Now in your search marketing efforts, if the bounce rate is high for keywords you are buying, you need to either improve the landing page to reinforce the topic or bid on keywords that are more relevant to your content etc.
16. Use Post Excerpts
If you find your article is too much long you can use post excerpts. Please note if there is too much content on the main page visitors will get tired by scrolling and they’ll decide to leave. Please use read more tag for that.
Final Words:
Hence in simple words, Bounce rates really shows how many visitors likes to read your blog articles and find your blog interesting. Thus, make sure that you use above strategies to decrease bounce rate of your Website or blog. Enjoy an don’t forgot to Subscribe to our blog for more latest stuffs like this. That’s it
Thanks for sharing.