As a blogger, its one of our goals to try to reduce our blog’s bounce rate. Of course, we all want to have people read our stuff and if possible stay on our site for a longer period of time. And do take note that its not just about staying on our blog doing nothing, its about them staying on our site but reading various content from us.
In this blog entry, I’ll discuss different ways on how we as a blogger can reduce our blog’s bounce rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
According to Google themselves, bounce rate is simply just the percentage of single or one-page visits on your site. This is also when a visitor exits on the same page as they entered. So as an example, if you visited this post and then left my blog through this post, you will be considered as a user who ‘bounced’ from my blog.
A very high bounce rate is indicative of various things like a).incorrect sets of audience for your site, b).poor content on your end and etc. So generally if you’re having a very high bounce rate, then you must be concerned that you’re falling into one of those two things I mentioned.
And you can read the following tips below on how you can reduce bounce rate on your site.
Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate
1. Have a landing page
I have been preaching on this method ever since and it seems that lots of bloggers don’t really understand the value of it. I’ve written a post on how using a landing page can increase your traffic but more importantly by using one, you are allowing yourself to attract the right people for your blog.
Think about it, a visitor is more likely to stay and navigate if he is directed to a specific landing page rather than straight to the homepage. Why would we want them to read our stuff more? We want to prove that we’re worth reading of course and that we know what we’re talking about.
2. Eliminate annoying elements
If you think about it, most people who navigate away from your site do it very quickly. Most of time its as quick as less than 10 seconds. There are various reasons for this but by analyzing it yourself, its more likely because they are annoyed on your site as a whole.
Most people don’t like ads, or they don’t like those lightbox popups. Some of them don’t like the sliders and all the fancy stuff. Obviously its hard to please everyone but you should at least try to please the majority. Easiest solution for this is to try minimizing your blog elements.
3. Write good content
Visitors don’t just land on your homepage or designated landing page. Most of the times they land on the specific blog post or article. With this, its very important to write good content to be able to persuade first time visitors to stay more and read more. You can do a simple test and compare your crappy posts from your best posts. You can easily spot the difference in bounce rate and see that your visitors stay with good content. Pretty fundamental tip!
4. Improve Loading Times
I am guilty of this myself. I used to sport themes before that load horribly slow due to lots of javascript stuff. As a result, lots of my readers probably just went away.
Make sure to work on always improving loading speed of your site. Check with Google Webmaster Central Site Performance Tool to see if your site is loading quick enough to satisfy the majority.
5. Minimize External Links
As bloggers, we’re naturally aren’t too shabby to hand out links to other bloggers. Its definitely not bad to give link loves but it sometimes has its own disadvantages and one of those is people going away from your own content. Another is diluting your pagerank although if you know me, I don’t really care that much about search benefits.
So just try to limit linking externally to other sites as it may be one of the reasons why your bounce rate is high.
Conclusion
Just like anything else, bounce rate is just a metric. I am always a proponent of studying your numbers and tweaking based on what it reflects. But still, you must never ever dwell too much on it. Don’t look at your bounce rate stats every 6 hours or so as it can obviously hamper your focus and productivity.
Personally, I do analyze my bounce rate a lot and do the necessary things that I think can help me out more in the long run. How about you? What’s your bounce rate and what’s your best tip to reduce it?