Almost every blogger including me and you always struggle to increase traffic to the website, better Google ranking and get more subscribers. And if you are running company’s official blog then you must be worried to get more leads and increase clients numbers. We are struggling, maybe bounce rate for websites are high.
How to reduce bounce rate? although there are hundreds of tricks but I want to help you with most working ones.
A fantastic and reliable way to increase traffic to your website is by having more landing pages. In 2013, HubSpot a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that deals with inbound marketing did a case study and revealed that websites having more than 40 pages drive more traffic to a website that website having 5 or fewer pages.
Experts says, once you start observing a high bounce rate on your website, get alerted to change your writing strategy.
If you know how to improve bounce rate? then getting a high ranking on Google is not a very big deal for you. Don’t worry, I have divided strategy into several sections.
In this articles, I will try to give you a deep understanding of what smart bloggers do to improve bounce rate and increase traffic to the website with their content production strategy.
What is bounce rate definition?
According to Wikipedia, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site. Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.
When someone sees only one page or triggers only one event, Google Analytic considers this a “bounce.” Your site’s Bounce Rate is the percentage of sessions that bounce.
If a reader enters your blog and leaves it without reading other internal pages, it is considered as a bounce.
What’s a Good Bounce Rate?
Excellent: 26-40
Average: 41-55
Bad: 56-70
Worry: below 20 and above 90.
Smarter ways to decrease high bounce rate on websites
1 – Content’s Readability must be good
When a visitor doesn’t find your website content easy to read, they simply move to another site. Specifically, large chunks of text scare readers away. So to improve the readability of your site I suggest you to divide the long paragraph into several sections. User finds easy to read and understand the divided contents.
While writing the articles use the words “I” and “You” so that readers feel they are in real conversation. It brings the personal touch to the blog. It makes your content user-friendly. Even when you are describing technical aspect break it up into several steps like you are talking with them.
To improve your readability you need to use formatting design. Below I am sharing some critical points.
Almost all WordPress theme now have default heading h1 for the title, so for this, you don’t care now. After this, you have to use subheading h2, h3, and bullet points to design your article in the best way.
- Use subheading for important topics it helps in getting extra attention.
- To explain pro and corn type content use bullet points.
- Use some infographics to make the discussion interesting.
- Use bold, underline and italic options on important keywords, but overloading is harmful.
- End up your articles with a topic like summary or conclusion. It helps the visitors to do a quick revision of what they learned. Make sure your summary contains best important points.
Want to check the readability of your site? go at www.read-able.com.
2 – No Popups – Do Not disturb the Reader
In a survey conducted in 2012, 70% of users found popups a kind of irritating and annoying factor. And I am sure it is not changed, and people always not prefer to read the site with popups. People just hate popups.
Here I refer popups to ads which upon clicking take visitors to unknown irrelevant sites and they simply decide not to come back. This indirectly decreases traffic to your website.
On my website, I don’t use these irritating popups as they make the readers feel unhappy. I personally decide to leave the other sites if am disturbed by popups ads.
It doesn’t mean you totally kill popups, some popups are necessary for every website that is willing to drive traffic to the website for free. For example, OptinMonster is a plugin which helps to grow your email list faster with the help of popup form. No blogger can deny this popup.
The Surveys by experts revealed that only 15% of readers responds to popup ad but more than 50% care to accept email offers.
Finally, I suggest you to avoid using irrelevant popups that directly or indirectly affect your traffic.
3 – Increase you website speed
Do you know people loves a website that loads quickly? Well, people want to your site to load within 2 sec and after they may leave and land to another same niche site.
I want to tell you while ranking the sites Google does consider the speed of your site. So if your site takes more time to load then you may slip in rankings.
In fact, more website load time directly increases the bounce rate of your website. Below is the conversion statistics of e-commerce site as per their load time.
Do you know what’s your current site speed? you can try Pingdom Speed test tool.
See clicktug.com load in 640 ms, yours may be higher or lower. You need to optimize your site speed after checking result.
4 – Make external links open in New Windows
You and I are a blogger and we blog only for people to read our blog. Designing and writing your content as per readers is the best strategy to increase traffic to the website.
“when you open external links in the same tab, you create back button fatigue for users.”
This literally means when readers click on the external link and if they have to come back to your site, unfortunately, they have to click back button or might they decide to quit. this your increases your site’s bounce rate.
You can use WP external links plugin for WordPress blog to set the external links to open in a new tab.
5 – Is your Site Mobile-Friendly?
Do you know ?
- 40% of Global YouTube views come from Mobile.
- 48%of all email is opened on a mobile device.
- 61%of all that followed a group/like a page created by brand came from mobile.
- 65% of all watched video clips on Facebook were on mobile.
- 68% of all clicked Facebook “like” buttons are from mobile.
- 73%of all uploaded and shared photos on Facebook are from mobile.
- 88% of all uploaded and shared photos on twitter came from mobile.
- 90% of shared links to blogs on twitter came from mobile.
- 75% of American use their mobile while on the toilet.
Above mentioned points are sourced from TechHive.
Now we live in a mobile age. Almost 90% of people use the internet on their mobile. If still you’re not satisfied with the suggestion, read quick facts.
Now mobile friendliness also contributes to Google ranking factor.
Want to test your site’s mobile friendliness?
#1: Visit Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. Enter your site URL (e.g., clicktug.com) and click on“ANALYZE” option:
#2: If your site is mobile friendly, you will get result as below.
Otherwise, you’ll see a result page similar to this:
You can easily make your website mobile friendly if you’re a WordPress user, install the JetPack plugin and activate mobile theme option.
Wait ! you have one more option WPTouch plugin.
And a very simple way is to use responsive theme such as Genesis Framework, Elegant theme etc. For these you need not use any plugin.
6. Use long tail keywords with high value
If really you want to improve your organic traffic then I suggest you use an expensive keyword that people searches mostly. It also helps you make more money.
If you are using AdSense on the website then this trick is more valuable than anything, the AdSense display ads on the basis of existing keywords. So if have extensive keyword more expensive ads are displayed on your website.
Do you know 97% of Google’s revenue come from advertisement? And more than the half revenue they generate from expensive keywords.
Each keyword have a different value, some bring valuable traffic and while other make you wait forever.
With expensive keywords, you should also use information keywords. Informational keywords are used to create awareness where users spend more time in getting more knowledge. And people start trusting on your website once they start spending more time on your website. This is how bounce rate reduces.
To get target traffic use long tail keywords and LSI keywords. There are many tools available to generate long tail keywords like a long tail pro.
You can find long tail keywords by Google Keyword Planner for free of cost. to drive extra search visitors.
7 – Write catchy Meta Description
Most of the new blogger don’t care to write meta description properly, they just copy the first 155 characters and paste into the meta description box. Many just leave it for Google and Google pulls out the description automatically. As a consequence, their click-through rate continues to decline.
Actually, newbies think it is not important – but it is. Using meta descriptions increases your search rate, when we type a keyword into Google search, using the algorithm of pattern recognition Google matches the searched term and highlight it by making it bold. So that we can better recognize the articles suitable for us.
Search engine use meta description and show a snippet of the articles so that user choose a suitable one.
Below I have described the deep structure of meta description for better understanding.
Search engines use meta description to display a snippet of your web page so that users can determine whether a particular search result is right for them just by reading the description.
Note: The recommended length of the meta description should be 155 characters. The characters beyond 155 characters will not be displayed in the search result, instead, you will see an ellipsis (…) at the end.
If you’re using any SEO plugin on WordPress blogs such as All In One SEO, Yoast SEO or other. I use SEOPressorV5, then you can easily set meta description. There is a meta description option below every page and post and if is left empty you get an error on SEO performance.
Include the target keyword: We write a meta description for visitors for their targeted keyword, so ensure to include the focused keywords at most twice.
8 – Update fresh and right content
Updating your blog with right content Keeping always increase website traffic free of cost. People love reading new and updated articles.
HubSpot says, regularly updating blogs get 120% more traffic than other websites who don’t. But content must be traffic targeted.
If you deliver the right content to readers, obviously you will get a “wow”. And “wow” is a kind website traffic generator.
Average bounce rate is shown below.
By regularly updating your blog you actually build a trust of your website and they start watching every action made on your site.
And finally, your increased visitors read the content on your blog with much interest, that gradually decreases bounce rate.
9 – Create more page
As I told you in beginning only, a website with 40 or more page gets more traffic than website having less number of the page. It actual makes your site rich in terms of content.
You can say it is a number game.
If people comes to the homepage of your site and doesn’t find anything relevant they simply leave. But if your website contains many numbers of pages, they may search for content they want. This improves your bounce rate.
With many numbers of pages, make sure to have easy navigation option, so that people don’t get difficulty in finding content.
Conclusion
In this articles, I tried to help you to reduce bounce rate and increase traffic to the website. But remember one thing “content is king” always try to publish the best content.
How to decrease bounce rate ?
- Content readability must be good.
- Avoid popups.
- Speed up your website.
- Make external links open in New Windows.
- Make your site mobile friendly.
- Use expensive & long tail keywords.
- Write catchy Meta Description.
- Update fresh and right content.
- Create more pages.
I have created this high-quality content for you only and I sure this will help you.
How to reduce bounce rate? your chance.
I wrote this special guide to make your readers spend more time on your site but I would love to know ideas and tricks you opt to improve bounce rate & drive traffic to your website.
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