If you have been running a blog for some time now, then you must know about all the important statistics you need to check and improve on. One of those statistics being bounce rate.
Before we get into how to improve your bounce rate, we first need to remind you of the importance of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics helps you see important statistics about your site, such as how often your visitors search for it and through which means, your traffic rate, where that traffic comes from (from which geolocation and online platforms), bounce rate, session time, page loading speed, and etc..
All of these statistics are important to know because based on them, you will be able to make appropriate changes and updates to your site.
Now let’s switch back to bounce rate.
Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of a single-page session on your site. Basically, if readers land on your website but leave it before going on any of your other pages, that is considered to be a bounce.
Ideally, your visitors, once on your site, should move through it by clicking on different links, links for purchasing something, contacting you, reading your blog, and so on. However, if the visitors leave your site too soon, it is either too difficult to navigate, too slow to load, or it doesn’t offer what they needed.
Having a high bounce rate can tell you that your visitors are leaving your site too soon, so you need to change something.
A reduction of your bounce rate makes it easier for you to convert your visitors but also indicates that you are providing useful content. So when you get your bounce rate at a satisfactory number, just keep doing what you are doing.
But still, when keeping tabs on your bounce rate, check your Google Analytics for any other issues while you are at it.
Tips you can implement to improve your bounce rate
1. Check your website
When it comes to changing your website, make sure you enhance the look and feel of it. Give it a good color contrast and larger fonts. Use headlines to easily organize the text and the content of the site so it is easy for a user to explore it.
Don’t be afraid of having white space. Meaning do not be afraid of not having anything on a specific part of your site, often it actually helps your visitors find their way around, and they feel less bombarded with site elements.
Be sensible when organizing your site. Use a good layout, quick navigation, and easy to find search bars. Also make the site responsive as many users browse on their mobile phones so make sure your site will work well on other devices, not just a PC or laptop.
2. Improve the site’s page loading time
Your visitors value their time and if your site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, they will leave and move on to another site. Also, if your page load time is slow you can also fall in SEO rankings.
Some of the tips to improve your page loading time are: keep only essential plugins (before downloading them, make sure they are working well), set the external links to open in a new tab to prevent “button fatigue”, enable file compression, reduce redirects, use a CDN, and browser cache your site. The design
3. Use the website’s menus
Proper website menus help your visitors find their way around your site and locate what they were looking for.
Most website owners don’t pay much attention to this, but it is extremely important for users. Having poor navigation makes them feel annoyed quickly, causing them to leave your site, and maybe not ever come back. A poor design can cause significant setbacks to your progress, so hiring design firms and letting the pros handle it is always a good idea.
4. Provide good content
Great content is the key to online success. Content with clear headlines, relevant topics, stylish text design, no grammatical errors, links to similar pages or content, clear calls to action, etc..
To make your content great, think about user experience, so you can find a proper way to make the content readable and interesting. For example, if it is a longer text, use charts and graphs to explain your findings so your readers don’t become too confused or bored.
5. Pay a lot of attention to your storytelling
Be truthful and captivate your audience with interesting ideas, tips, or stories. Exaggerating or adding untruthful elements can only hurt and damage your credibility and reputation, both things that are very important to customers in today’s online world.
6. Avoid popups
Many users, over 70% of them, find most popups annoying. That is why you should avoid using them so your visitors don’t feel annoyed as soon as they click on your site.
Besides that, popups can also disrupt your visitors’ reading flow.
7. Keep your content new and fresh
Regularly update your blog, as well as your list of products if you have one. Also, make sure you add sales or promotion codes to your site so your users can be notified about all good deals.
8. Change and update your keywords
Maybe the wrong visitors are ending up on your site because as you are using the wrong keywords. That is why you should make sure that you are using keywords relevant to your site and your business.
Keywords are really important since they bring in the customers in the first place.
To find the best keywords for you, go to Google Keyword Planner and insert your main keyword to get ideas about what other keywords to use. Once you find them, add them, so your website can pop up as soon as someone searches those specific keywords.
9. Use internal links
Internal links are great for SEO but they also help reduce bounce rate.
Essentially what they are is linking from one page on your site to another in order to direct your readers to similar content and keep them on your site longer (thus decreasing the bounce rate).
Naturally, you should only link to actually relevant content, because doing things in any other way can have a damaging effect on your bounce rate.
10. Include social proof and social media links
Tell your readers more about who you are, let them see how well your social media accounts are doing, and how you are engaging with your audience.
If they see you care about your social media and that you are engaging with your audience and followers, their idea of your business will be uplifted and they will see you as someone who values their time, money, and business.
11. Write good meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that describe what a web page is about. They let users decide if a particular site is the right site for them.
To write good meta descriptions, use target keywords and calls to action, to compel your visitors to click on your site.
12. Customize your 404-error page
The purpose of 404 pages is to prevent bounces so do not be afraid to make your 404 pages something creative and interesting. That way your visitors might forget the fact that they cannot find a page, and instead, they can enjoy the page’s funny-looking design.
13. A/B test everything
You want to know for sure why your visitors are leaving your site. To have clear info on that, you need to test several elements and see which one works or doesn’t work.
For this purpose, you can use Google Optimize to A/B test and personalize your site.
14. Check your site on different browsers
Not everyone uses the same browser and there are plenty of browsers out there through which your site will be viewed (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, but also Pale Moon and Vivaldi). So you need to make sure that your site looks good on all of them. How?
You can check how your website looks on different browsers using BrowserStack and Browserling. If you find some issues, go to WordPress (if you have a WordPress site) and modify/change the faulty elements.
Usually, that will be either your CSS Framework, conditional comments, CSS reset, or valid doctype.
Conclusion
In short, bounce rates are important. They can either make or break your business so you want to ensure you keep them as low as possible.
To make that happen, we suggest you follow and try out every single tip we listed since there is no tip more important than the other. They all work together.
So, take some time to go and check your website because that is the only way you can improve your bounce rate.
In this article, we listed the tips we think could help you improve your site’s bounce rate. But the most important element in that process should be to keep regularly checking your Google Analytics page.
Google Analytics will tell you everything you need to know about your website. Meaning that if you carefully check your GA reports, you will easily be able to tell what is wrong and what needs to be improved in order for your site to run successfully.
