36 Best Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

As i already have talked about BOUNCE RATE & PAGEVIEWS, now i am sharing the ways to reduce bounce rate and increase pageviews in this post. To know more about Bounce Rate and Pageviews click here.

In short, Bounce Rate is the percentage of web site visitors who arrive at an entry page on your web site, then leave without visiting any other pages or leave without going any deeper into the site.

Below are some ways to reduce bounce rate of your site.

Bounce Rate

Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

1. Good Web Layout & Design : You should be careful while choosing between magazine and normal layout theme. Many recommend Thesis theme for better bounce rate. The look of your site’s design can force your visitors to stay. Your website should be as simple as possible.
2. Relevant Content : If your blog is about Gadgets, then publish articles related to Gadgets category alone. Don’t write about Fruits and Vegetables. Because visitors will expect more from Gadgets category.
3. Clear and Proper Navigation : Let the visitors of your site know where they are. Every blog should have breadcrumb. Have a proper archives section. Place the navigation menu near the top of the page. Use simple and clear words for navigation options.
4. Good and Original Content : Always publish original content. Never publish duplicate content which will affect your blog in several ways. Your blog’s content should be worth reading.
5. Contrast Is Key : No one will stay on a site they can’t read. Of all of the ways to increase accessibility of a site, perhaps the biggest and easiest is to simply use good contrast. Not only does this make the site more accessible to visitors who may have difficulty seeing, but also has the overall effect of making important content easier to find and focus on. Contrast can be a powerful tool for directing the reader’s attention to where you want it to go. More and more people are accessing the web via mobile devices, which means your site will be viewed on a variety of screen resolutions — in any number of lighting conditions — so your site needs to be as readable as possible in these situations.
6. Avoid Distractions : Avoid pop-ups, external toolbars and anything similar to that which causes distractions to the visitors. You can also avoid using Text In Link ads.
7. Improve loading speed : Don’t make your visitors to wait. Your blog’s page views will automatically increase if the pages load faster and quicker.
8. Update Your Content : If you have content that is dated, consider adding some new information. Check your analytics to see which pages have the highest bounce rate and revisit the page copy for these pages.
9. Add Relevant Images : Make sure you add relevant and related images to the articles. Provide good resolution and quality images.
10. Avoid External Links : External links on your blog’s main page can make the bounce rate very high. So you can avoid external links on the first page that visitors see when they land on your site. Try to reduce the number of outgoing links.
11. Comparing : Compare the page which gets lower bounce rate with the page that gets higher. Ask your friends and other fellow bloggers the difference between them. This one can help a lot.
12. Analyze Bounce Rate : I recommend Google Analytics for analyzing your site’s bounce rate. Check site’s bounce rate regularly and see if there is any change. Study the reports. See which page gets the lowest bounce rate and highest bounce rate.
13. Ample Content : Try to have minimum 300-400 words of content on your site’s pages. Try to provide sufficient content to your site visitors. Let it be in the form of images, text or videos.
14. Targeted Keywords : Your Keywords should be specifically targeted for the content on your site. Bounce rates are also influenced by wrongly optimized keywords. Consider a post title like this, “Top 15 Twitter Tools for Twitter Freaks“. And you optimize this post title with wrong keywords like “Twitter Hacks” or “Twitter’s New Service”. This makes the users annoy and they won’t visit that page/site later.
15. Minimize Pages : Try to minimize the number of pages you have on your website. Keep it simple and clear, so that your visitors will not get confused.
16. Optimize Keywords : Always use the keywords within your articles. For example, I have a post titled “Killer Ways to Build Backlinks | The Ultimate Guide“, and then I will use the keywords like “Ways to Build Backlinks”, “Make Backlinks” and so on. This will indeed increase the value of the keywords on the search engines.
17. Good and Effective Headlines : Each page’s title should match the content within that page. Don’t try to use misleading page titles. You can refer Google’s “ Five Tips for Writing Effective Web Headlines “.
18. Offer subscriptions : You can offer RSS, feeds and E-mail newsletters by which readers can easily subscribe and get daily updates. This will help in enhancing your site’s bounce rate because those readers will come back to read more.
19. Good Quality Links : Try to acquire as many good links as possible that points to your blog or blog’s page. Those links should have correct anchor text. You can hook other webmasters to link to your pages by placing genuine content in your pages. Avoid link exchange since there is a possibility of losing PageRank on both sides.
20. Remove Autoplay Videos : This is my opinion. I’ll close the site immediately if it starts singing. Remove the video altogether, or at least have it paused.
21. Popular Posts : You can use Popular Posts plugin and list the top and popular articles in your site’s sidebar.
22. Related Posts : Providing related links to other content on your site can go a long way in keeping visitors engaged, but you’ll have the best results the more relevant the content is. But you don’t want to go overboard; users can easily be overwhelmed by too much information. Less is often more. There are many ways to show related posts on your blog. You can try Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) .
23. Internal Linking : By internal linking your readers can know about other content of your site without having to search for it. Interlink only if it is related to the article and you can also do this to your old articles. Try to link between your old articles as reference.
24. Place Search Box : You can provide your visitors with the option to search on your blog at the top. If they cannot find anything interesting on the landing page, they can use search option to navigate into the site.
25. Page SEO : Provide proper URL , title and keyword optimization. For WordPress users, I recommend Yoast SEO plugin.
26. Interactive Articles : Your article should be in a reader friendly manner.
27. Free Downloads : You can easily attract visitors if you provide free downloads like free themes, free wallpapers and so on. You can make them click on that link easily.
28. Use Post Excerpts : If your article is too long you can use post excerpts. If there is too much content on the main page visitors will get tired by scrolling and they’ll decide to leave.
29. Eliminate Bad Traffic : If getting/buying traffic from other sites is not profitable to you, then you need to eliminate all those sources. Check which PPC keywords are bouncing and shut those keywords.
30. Upper Left to Lower Right : Keep the upper left of your site pretty, pretty nice and attractive. Because visitors will first see that only and that decides whether they need to stay or not.
31. Optimize 404 Pages : Many blogs have ugly 404 error page. That makes the bounce rate to bounce more. Your visitors will leave your site and look elsewhere for the information they were looking for. So optimize the error page. Provide some solutions and suggestions there. You can use 404 redirection plugin.
32. Optimize The Sidebar : Remove all those useless and time consuming widgets from your site’s sidebar and try to include widgets such as “Popular Posts”, “Recent Articles” & “tag cloud” in the sidebar.
33. Surveys and Polls : This is the best way to interact with your readers and visitors. Ask them some questions or suggestions. You can check the results and you can predict whether they will stick around or not.
34. Don’t Get Tricky : There are lot of other tricks you can use to lower your bounce rate, like embedding polls, contests, and other attention-grabbing clickable content. However, if the sole purpose of these tactics is just to lower your bounce rate, you may lose sight of what a real consumer is looking for. The temptation to use keyword and SEO-heavy headlines is strong, but if they misrepresent the content of an article or post, you may lose out on repeat visitors, even if your bounce rates are reduced temporarily. Although it is important to make a good first impression, a site’s mission to either sell, entertain or inform should always be primary.
35. Be Mindful of Ad Placement : No one likes looking at advertisements, but the reality is that most of the sites could not survive without them. Advertisements are a necessary evil that allows content providers to make money but too many advertisements can be a big turn-off to your readers. Advertising that’s too close to your site navigation can cause accidental clicks, which force visitors to leave your page — unintentionally, and in frustration. Too many ads above the fold means your readers have more to wade through before getting to the heart of your site. Also, ads that interrupt your content or present themselves as if they were a part of your website can cause confusion and frustration. Keep advertising prominently placed but far enough out of the way that visitors can still use your site without having to navigate around a sea of ads.
36. Check Browser Performance : The developer who built your site might have worked exclusively in Firefox and might failed to check its performance in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google chrome. Unfortunately, parts of your site that load fine in one type of browser struggle in others. Your analytics tool can break down bounce by browser type to see if this is the culprit.

 

Bounce Rate Is Low But Not Seeing Any Results

There can be a lot of potential reason for this issue but one thing that is related to bounce rate that you can check is exit percentage. Google defines exit percentage rate as this: “The percentage of site exits that occurred from a page or set of pages”. If you are seeing a page that your visitors land on often in the flow of your site that has a high exit percentage look deeper into that page. You could be wasting the effort you have put into lowering your bounce rate if the other pages on your site are bad.

 

You can add your thoughts in comments. Did i miss any? If you know any other ways to reduce bounce rate you can share here in comments.

To see more click on the following title 36 Best Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate