How to Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Users in your Blog
Accepting that your site has a high bounce rate is a little like accepting that maybe, just maybe, your child isn’t the best-looking kid in the schoolyard. Sure, you think your precious little angel is just adorable (and just so we’re clear, we’re talking about your website now), yet when you head into Google Analytics to check the numbers, your bounce rate tells a different story.
It’s hard to come to terms with. After all, you love your website, so why doesn’t everybody else?
Of course, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is what constitutes a “good” bounce rate. Some sites might view a bounce rate of 80% as awesome, whereas other sites might see this as nothing short of catastrophic. It really depends on your site and business goals.
Regardless, many site managers and webmasters pay close attention to bounce rate as an overall indication of a site’s “stickiness” or appeal, and would like to reduce this troublesome number as much as they can. Some people even think that bounce rate can influence your search rankings, via Google’s new machine-learning algorithm. So it’s obviously in your interest to optimize this metric.
In this post, we’ll look at all the possible ways to reduce bounce rate in Our Blog.
However, before we dive in, we need to talk about the flaws inherent in bounce rate as a performance metric and what this means for you as a marketer. Check out this post first What is bounce rate A brief note about bounce rate or if you know all about bounce rate just scroll down and read how to reduce or decrease Bounce Rate in blog or site.
A website that loads at a lethargic pace is what one calls a bounce paradise. For every extra second your web pages take to load, your conversions can drop.
Decibel Insight’s research on page load time and bounce ratesays that slow loaders have a 72% higher bounce rate than fast loaders, and a 38% higher bounce rate than medium loaders. A fast-loading site also scores high on search rankings. Site speed is critical and you should take all possible steps to make yours faster. Here’s a link to Google’s best practices to reduce loading time. Find out your site speed by using this free tool
More options are:
* Dump out unnecessary plugins from Blog.
* Use Optimized images.
* Set 5-8 recent posts in main page.
Ever clicked through to a blog post or web page, only to discover an immense, intimidating wall of text? If so, you already know how discouraging this can be to readers. Even if your content is incredibly valuable and completely unique, it won’t matter if your readers are scared off by the prospect of wading into a blog post of equal density as War and Peace or Les Miserable.
Formatting your pages to be as welcoming and accessible as possible is one of the best ways to reduce your bounce rate. The less “work” a visitor has to do to get what they want, the more likely they are to stick around. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with weighty paragraphs that span entire pages, and make use of white space to make your content more approachable.
Here are some ways to make content less visually intimidating:
* Appropriate use of headers.
* Frequent subheadings.
* Suitable images.
* Bulleted lists.
Use of these formatting options makes your content more accessible and allows the reader to scan or skim your content quickly to identify points that are most relevant to their needs.
That said, don’t insult your readers’ intelligence, either. Trust your audience to know what they need, then give it to them. I’ve seen blogs that, while offering useful information, insist on using a line break or including an image between every single sentence, which can be just as annoying as huge walls of text.
It’s a little sad that we have to reiterate how important this is, but the number of websites that still aren’t optimized for mobile is breathtaking. With the number of users accessing the Web primarily from mobile devices increasing every year, failing to optimize your site for mobile is practically begging for users to bounce and take their business elsewhere.
Unfortunately, launching a mobile-friendly site is a huge pain in the ass, especially for larger websites. It’s just that simple. It can be a painstaking process, and may be beyond your own technical capabilities, which means it can also be another (considerable) expense for your site or business. However, it’s hard to understate just how crucial mobile optimization is for every type of site, and you should strongly consider making your site mobile friendly, regardless of the time, effort, and expense involved, or the ulcers or sleepless nights you incur in the process.
It’s also vitally important to remember tip #1 when optimizing your site for mobile. It doesn’t matter how pretty your site looks on an iPhone if it takes more than a minute to load.
If you don't want to mess up with your blog/sites templates either hire a web designer or spend few dollars to buy ready to use mobile friendly templates .
This is a point which perhaps applies to ecommerce more than other sites. Let’s take an example from the travel sector. If you’re researching hotels to stay in, then the obvious destination for many web users is TripAdvisor. There they can find (in theory) impartial views on the hotel which cut through the sales pitch on the hotel or travel agent’s website.
However, once on TripAdvisor, they may be swayed by other hotels. If you have reviews on site though, or have integrated TripAdvisor reviews on the page, then one reason to head elsewhere is removed.
I’m all for giving credit when its due when it comes to links, but if you add external links early in a post and don’t open them in a new window, you’re essentially asking users to your site and inflate your bounce rates.
Site search provides an easy navigation option for visitors. On ecommerce sites, site search users often convert at higher than the average rate, as using it can indicate a greater intent to purchase.
On other sites, search provides users with analternative way to navigate through sites, one that some web users prefer. Give visitors easy and clear ways to navigate around your site. Make navigation intuitive and consistent.
Keyword optimization is a crucial part of directing users to your site. But make sure you’re not attracting the WRONG kinds of users. Be cognisant ofwho your visitors should be and deliver content that speaks totheir needs and interests.
For example, if you sell Books in your Blog/site, optimize for Book-related keywords. The goal is that visitors who have searched for Book will be happy with your results if you are delivering on the SEO promise that you do, in fact, sell Book. Don’t optimize around Stationery items unless you also sell those. It’s a waste of your SEO juice and your visitors’ time – plus it increases bounce rate.
If you notice that your bounce rate is high, specifically on your homepage or subsequent landing pages, take a look at your keywords and make some specific alterations.
Lots of broken links will cause a poor user experience, driving your bounce rates up. Using the Webmaster Tools crawl error report, or a scraper like Screaming Frog , Brokenlinkcheck.com, Deadlinkchecker, Linktiger identify all of the broken links on your site and fix as many of them as possible.
For blogs, it’s likely that a large portion of your bounces are coming from people clicking on external links in your posts.
If you’re using WordPress, there’s a plugin that will automatically open all of your external links in a new tab. Other wise, the easiest thing to do is to simple add target=”_blank” in all of your external links.
<a href="web link" target="_blank"> your text here</a>
I’m sure we’re all familiar with those ‘top 50’ posts where you have to click next to load the next page in thecount down. Initially, publishers used this technique to boost advert impressions (one visit became 50 impressions, instead of one). While you may not need to go quite this far, you can reduce your bounce rates by splitting your long posts into a series of shorter chapters or parts.
Being new to the blogging world I feel like there is still so much to learn. Your tips helped to clarify a few things for me as well as giving..
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You can also try tools for reducing the bounce rate of your website such as “Remind Me Later”. It is the best tool I have ever used.
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