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Tuesday 29 March 2016

How to Reduce Bounce Rate of a Website


Ideally, the bounce rate of your website should be in the range of 30 to 50%. However, if the bounce rate of your site is above 70%, you need to take some concrete measures to reduce bounce rate of your website.

If you are increasingly experiencing high bounce rate, you can do several things to reduce it. I managed to improve the bounce rate of my blog by 25% over the past two months by following some simple steps.

Although, bounce rate might not be the right metrics to measure the quality of your blog content; however, it can negatively impact the ranking of your site.


Tips to Decrease Bounce Rate


Identify the pages with high bounce rate


First, identify the pages that are contributing to high bounce rate in your blog. In the Google analytics, you can easily identify the pages with high bounce rate. In your Google Analytics dashboard click on Behavior then click site content. In site content drop down menu choose All Pages and will see a window that displays all the pages as shown in the screenshot below.



The window provides you useful information related to Unique Pageviews, Average Time on Page, Bounce Rate and Page Value. You can also arrange the information according to your convenience. For example, if you want to identify pages with high bounce rate you can short the information using the performance command on the panel provided at the upper right side of the window.

Figure out the reasons behind high bounce rate


Once you have discovered the pages with high bounce rate, open the pages in another browser one by one. It would become a tedious process if you have many pages in your blog. In that case, you should better focus on a few pages per day and try to improve the bounce rate of those pages one by one.

Now check the social shares and social media likes on your page. Delete or direct search engines not to index the pages performing poorly on social media sites. It will help you improve the overall ranking of your website. On the other hand, if you have got a decent amount of likes, social share or backlinks it means there is no problem with the content of your page. On such pages, you need to focus on interlinking.

Check the internal links in the pages


If your high bounce rate posts have weak internal links, add relevant links to your page. Internal links improve your site navigation and enable your blog visitors to read other pages on your blog. Internal links are also useful from the viewpoint of search engine ranking.

On the other hand, if your pages have strong internal links and still you are experiencing high bounce rate you need to check out the source of traffic to these pages. If you are getting organic traffic on these pages it means you have not used right keywords to rank these pages higher in the search results.

Check the keywords you are using for optimization


Remember, there is a very slight difference between right keywords and wrong keywords. For example, if you are using keywords like “cheap branded shoes” whereas your content is related to sports shoes only, you are most likely to experience high bounce rate. Similarly, make sure to make your title as clear as possible. In other words, avoid misguiding your audience.

Also, read:


Create actionable call for action


Give a strong reason to your blog visitors to subscribe to your blog. Offer your audience a free ebook for subscribing to your blog or provide a reason to visit other pages on your blog. You can also include videos or podcast in your content.

If you are sure your site is not a victim of any of the above-mentioned problems, you need to check the word count of the pages with high bounce rate.

Avoid writing very long posts


Although long posts are increasingly gaining popularity as they stand a better chance of ranking higher in the search results, however, sometimes they also become the cause of high bounce rate. Interestingly, the most popular posts on my blog have the highest bounce rate.

One of the reasons for the high bounce rate on these pages is the word count of these pages. Although visitors spend a considerable amount of time on these pages, however, they leave these pages once they get the information they need.
  
A long post takes more than usual time to read, and visitors are most likely to leave the landing page after reading such long posts. So make sure to keep your post at reasonable length and provide additional information through internal links. 

Alternatively, you can also reduce the bounce rate of short posts in your blog. It will help you to improve the overall bounce rate of your blog. This is what I usually do to improve the bounce rate of my blog.

However, if your blog content can be easily read and understood, it will not take much time for readers to read your content quickly. Avoid grammatical mistakes, arrange you content effectively and use a font size that can be read easily.

Also, read: 


Improve site navigation


Check out whether the links are easily visible to your blog visitors. Make sure your blog readers can easily find the links to most popular posts and blog achieves. Moreover, provide a sitemap for human visitors, too.


A poor navigation increases the bounce rate as visitors find it hard to search the information they are looking for. Therefore, make sure to add Google search box gadget to enable your readers to search content they are looking for within your blog. 

Google search gadget not only helps your readers to search the information they are looking for  it also helps you get insight into what your blog readers want to read in your blog. You can use the information to create new posts for your blog readers.


Finally, improve loading time of your website


You are most likely to experience high bounce rate if your website takes more than usual time to load. When a site takes more time to load, users are most likely to leave the page to look for the information somewhere else. Thus, slow loading speed leads to high bounce rate.

You can significantly lower the bounce rate of your website by improving the loading speed of your site. Check the issues related to loading speed of your blog or website and address them immediately. 

Google Search Console provides you useful insight into the issues related to loading speed of your website. You can use this tool to improve the loading time of your site. 

Do you find this post useful? Please feel free to share your opinion. If you liked this post, please make sure to share it with others. Keep learning, Keep sharing!

2 comments:

  1. Please I will so much appreciate your help.
    I am a Blogspot user like you. But there is a feature in your blog I have been looking for a way to implement -Sitemap.

    Please with a tutor on how I can create a sitemap for my blog.

    Thanks, in anticipation of your reply.

    Abalagbeyiwa Ezekiel

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Ezekiel for taking out time to comment. If you want to create an XML sitemap please read my post https://eagleyedguide.blogspot.in/2016/06/how-to-create-custom-xml-sitemap-for.html

      If you want to create an HTML sitemap please read https://eagleyedguide.blogspot.in/2016/04/how-to-create-html-sitemap-for-blogger.html

      I hope it helps you create sitemap for your blogger blog.

      Delete