We keep talking about increasing traffic to our Website but one factor which most of the time we miss out is user engagement and user behavior. Post panda world, all these factors matter a lot, and a site getting 10000 hits a day but all visitors leaving after visiting one page only, doesn’t sound like a quality page/site to me. Today, we will be learning about bounce rate which is a analytic factor to determine how readers are taking action after reading your post. Are they moving to other pages of your site or they jumping away to new website
Strategies to decrease Bounce rate:
Bounce rate is a great measurement for the success of your blog. Maintaining a good bounce rate is very tough but not impossible. I will share few working tips here, which worked for me to decrease bounce rate of my website and it should work for you too.
Bounce Rate in simple words:
Bounce rate is the best way to analyze your blog’s visitor’s activity. It is the percentage of visits, when a visitors lands on your blog post and leave the same page without visiting any other page. There are visitors who bounce soon after landing on your blog post. It’s up to you how you welcome visitors to your blog and attract to other blog’s pages also.
So, let’s get some facts straight here:
· Lower your bounce-rate, better it is.
· High bounce rate is bad for your Website
· Exit rate and bounce-rate are two different things
Strategies to decrease Bounce rate:
If you are using Google analytics, you can quickly login to your site dashboard and check B.R for particular time frame. If you have made any design change in near past, I would suggest to compare bounce-rate before and after design change.
Design and load time
First impression is last impression, it goes for blogging also. When a visitor lands on your blog, the first thing he notice is your blog’s loading time and design of your blog. If you promote your articles on social media, make sure that your landing page don’t take much time in loading otherwise you might lose your new visitors. Design is another aspect of attracting visitors.
External site opens in new Tab:
If you have understood, what does bounce rate means, it’s no brainer to understand how important your visitor should stick to your site. Now, almost all popular Web-browser offers tabbed browsing and it’s a good idea to make all extrenal Website link should open in new tab instead of yours. A case study by Uxmoment, explains the science of opening sites in new tab and why it’s important for your Website.
So, in short when you are linking to any site (Wiki, Youtube, or any external site), select the option which says open in new tab, as shown in above screenshot.
Easy to read articles
There are many bloggers who don’t write articles in points. If you won’t divide your articles in parts, it will be more like reading a newspaper and others have to read line by line to get the idea about your article. Other bloggers and visitors land to your article because they need solution for that topic, they don’t have time to spend on reading line by line.
Make your article scanable and easy to read for your visitors. Try to give a style to your heading (H2, H3, H4) , and use it to make your content scannable. This will also help you to drive traffic via social media sites.
Related posts
Showing related posts helps a lot, as once a reader is done reading the article, he wants to read more about the similar topic. Think, what kind of action do you take after reading any article. There are many WordPress Plugins like Yarpp, Similar posts which works out of the box and easy to add related posts.
My placement idea for related posts is after posts and showing related posts with thumbnail has an extra advantage as it increases the CTR. One suggestion which I would like to give you is, start showing related posts based on category and tags, as more closely posts are related, it will encourage more click.
One thing which will bring big different and will also help you to increase the time on your site is write related topic to your most viewed pages, which helps a lot.
Easy Navigation
Your blog should be easy to navigate from one page to another. Visitor should not get confused about the blog’s navigation. If they won’t get what they are looking for, they will surely leave the blog.
Search box and relevant links
It’s always recommended to have a search box which is easily visible by visitors. Visitors always prefer to search for articles they are looking for. If you want to decrease your bounce rate make sure that you link only relevant articles with each other. Irrelevant articles might irritate your visitors and they will leave blog soon.
Internal linking:
This is one factor which helps a lot to let your reader stay more into your Website. Try to interlink your blog post as much as you could. Have you seen Wikipedia SEO strategies, you would realize they add lots of internal links within a page. More over, it also helps in boosting your search engine ranking if you are doing it with anchor text technique.
If you are using WordPress, you can use plugins like WordPress insight plugin to find related post while writing blog post or use SEO smart link premium to auto inter link post with your desire Keywords. This is one highly recommended tip to decrease bounce rate of any website. More over, this will also help in better avg. time on your site and make readers browse more internal pages.
Nice blogging is another great factor, which will help a lot as readers will find more related and similar topic. Lets take a guess, would you prefer to read about forex or taxation after reading this post? .
Bounce rates shows how many visitors likes to read your blog article and find your blog interesting. Thus, make sure that you use above strategies to decrease bounce rate of your Website.
