In simple term, a page’s bounce rate is actually the percentage of visits that land on the page and leave immediate without visiting your other blog pages.
As a savvy business owner in a fast-paced world, you know that having an online presence is crucial to having a thriving business.
Your website is often the first information a prospective customer will receive about your product or service, and you want them to be impressed.
Oftentimes, readers will browse through a single web page and leave the website without pursuing further information.
Bounce rate, a useful analytic, shows you the percentage of readers who, for one reason or other, chose to leave your site after browsing a single page, your homepage.
Bounce rate matters to your business – a lot more than you might think. High bounce rates can mean many things, including a boring or not well laid out homepage.
You want that first page to be spectacular, something to keep readers on your site. Rest assured, lowering that bounce rate percentage is easier than you think.
Having a super niche site will help bring in readers who are actually interested in what you have to offer. They will be more likely to browse around your website, reading multiple posts because everything will be closely related. Take care in choosing a niche, and work hard to stick to it.
Having links to other areas of your website will keep readers engaged. Your home page may be awesome, but none of that matters if you have no content. Things to include are an about me page and a list of relevant posts in the sidebar, easily visible for readers to browse through. If you have reached you proper audience, chances of your link click-through rate being high are good.
Make sure that the posts you offer are relevant and free of fluff, stuffing that readers could care less about.
Pay attention when creating new content, and make sure that each new post adds value to your website, instead of cluttering it down with useless jargon.
When readers frequent the web, they tend to gravitate towards certain kinds of posts that feed their need for information.
Having a selection of these available for perusal will help lower your bounce rate considerably. How-to posts are great, as are list and video posts. However, people often forget to include what and why posts, which are equally important.
An example of a what post would be about what you learned by lowering your bounce rate, and a why post would try to inform a reader about why to do something or why something, like your product is now essential.
The internet has changed over the years, and so has how people utilize it. Now that internet equipped mobile phones are the standard, they are beginning to replace computer-based browsing.
Having a responsive web design will help keep bounce rate from skyrocketing.
No one wants to have to struggle through a website on their phone, swiping their screen way to the side every time they want to read a line of text.
Make it easy for them, or they’ll leave.
Having catchy headlines will help draw readers in. Think about when you personally browse the web.
You click on articles that have headlines that draw you in. The title of a post is the first thing that readers see.
You need to make it clear what the post is about, and you need to word it in a way that will intrigue readers.
Having informative headlines can also help you gain traction in search results, increasing overall traffic to your website.
Making sure your traffic is targeted to the proper audience will go a long way in helping to improve your bounce rate.
This is where promoting your content becomes especially crucial. Even if you have tons of great content with links to other areas of your website, none of that will matter if the people winding up at your website have no interest in your topic.
Work on promoting your content based on a careful selection of the right interest-based network, that is related to your niche.
Photo courtesy: CRWconnect
Another trick to add to your bag is the use of pictures and videos on your website. People are strapped for time and want something that will engage them in a matter of seconds.
As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s a lot of words conveyed in a single second that would have taken minutes to read.
The same goes for videos. A lot more can be absorbed in a few minute video than a lengthy blog post. Just take care and make sure to have auto-play off, or you risk startling someone and turning them away from your website.
Many website owners fail to examine the small stuff, completely looking them over.
What they don’t realize, is that small things, like not having links open in new windows, can turn away readers and help worsen bounce rate percentages.
Open link in a new window.
When you link to someone else’s blog post, that’s great, but stop to think for a moment.
If you don’t have that link opening in a new window, you’re losing all your traffic to people who click those links.
They are taken to the new website and yours is forgotten instead of waiting safely in another window to be read through in more depth after they are done with the link you gave them.
People want information, ready at the click of a mouse, immediately. Website owners used to be able to get away with a site that loaded slower than molasses, but those were the days.
With the information boom, if your site takes more than a few seconds to load, people are going to click out of your site and look elsewhere for what they need.
Many things can slow down your site, from huge pictures with lots of data, multiple videos loading, tons of plugins, or even broken links, so take care to have a simple, streamlined web page.
Infographics Source: Kissmetrics.
Cleaning up your website so that it’s easy on the eyes and simple to read is important.
Cluttered footers and sidebars do nothing to attract traffic and paying customers, even if they are a bit nifty.
Make sure you keep your sidebar clean just like the a=one above.
Keep it to the minimum to keep your site from being annoying.
Take away any moving graphics and keep it streamlined. You should concentrate on making sure that everything on your site is working for your intended purpose. If it’s not, toss it.
A poor website design will cause your bounce rate to jump sky high overnight. Hiring a good designer or taking the time to do this properly is one of the most important steps you can take as a business owner.
You want to aim for a clean website that functions well, with posts that are easy to read, not just huge blocks of text. You want your website to look professional, but not so flashy that it turns people away. Links should all be in good working order, not broken links that lead to nothing.
Lastly, being active and responsive on social media will keep people coming back to your website for a long time. In today’s digital world, much contamination is done online, even through the comments section of your website.
Responding to comments and being helpful will show readers that you are involved and care enough to invest time into your business. Other areas to work on building a social media presence include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, among others.
Always be on the lookout for new lines of communication. Communicating on the level of your customers is more than beneficial, it’s crucial.
Decreasing your bounce rate percentage may seem like a lot of work at first, but once you get down to it, you’ll realize how easy these changes are to implement. Performing a number of simple tasks, from cleaning up your website to producing quality content that a specific group of readers wants to read, will help your blog’s bounce rate stay at a consistent number that will raise your spirits a good deal.
Keeping readers on the page is important, and these solutions will help you achieve it.
Updated: 26/6/15
SUBSCRIBE TO RANKREVEAL’S BLOG
Join 100,000+ fellow SEO marketers! Get RankReveal’s latest insights straight to your inbox.
Enter your email address below:
Subscribe and receive exclusive insider tips and tricks on SEO.
Delivered to you right from the industry’s best SEO team.
Copyright © 2023 RankReveal. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by Semantic BigData Analytics (SBDA).
