Dorji discovered my blog and opened it at 8 A.m. He then read some articles, watched some videos and then closed it at 8.30A.m. This means Dorji has spent 30 minutes reading my blog. This 30 minutes shall determine my blog’s bounce rate.
There are many readers like Dorji. It’s obvious that the time they spend will differ from one to another. And when an average time is calculated, if the average time is favourably good, my blog is said to have low Bounce Rate.
When readers spent maximum time, bounce rate will be lower and vice-versa. We can say that a Bounce Rate is inversely proportional to average time spent by readers.
What is mean by Bounce Rate? Google Dictionary defines Bounce Rate as:
The % of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
This means higher bounce rate is surely not good. As a blogger, I have to implement necessary blogging strategies to make Dorji spend more than just 30 minutes and also other visitors. More is better.
So what should I do? I have prepared a list of DOs to reduce my Bounce Rate.
30 strategies to reduce Bounce Rate-Beginner’s Guide
#1 Select a Good Premium WordPress Theme
The theme you uses determines the overall attractiveness of your blog. We know an adage ‘First impression is the last impression.’ Read this post for some WordPress theme suggestion and this post to see most expensive themes.
In blogging if a visitor was dissatisfied on the first glance, you won’t get a second chance to prove that earlier was wrong and you have a better one.
It’s the theme that determines the quality of first impression. Therefore, you must use a good premium WordPress theme in your blog. Having no money shouldn’t be your excuse.
#2 Customize Designs and Appearances
Once you have purchased a good premium theme, there’s no guarantee that it will turn out just like in demo during activation. You must customize it. Special Offer: 30 custom CSS to customize StudioPress Genesis Child Theme
You need to learn basic CSS and PHP of web designing. If these things aren’t something hidden up your sleeves, you can hire professionals. But you must be very careful in making them what you want.
#3 Install Necessary Plugins
There are tens and thousands of plugins to install in WordPress blog. But you shouldn’t go on installing in your blog whichever you come across like fanatic blogger.
Study well before actually installing any plugins. Some of them won’t give much value for you but reduce the loading speed of your blog; another determinant of Bounce Rate.
#4 Make Posts Sharing Easy
When we visit some blogs and find some articles very interesting, we feel tempted to share them in our Facebook walls or Pin in our Pinterest Board, but we have to literally search for sharing buttons.
If share buttons are available, we’ll immediately share. But what happens if there aren’t sharing buttons? We never think of taking extra effort in sharing. Frustrated and annoyed, we close that blog.
Therefore, add sharing buttons wherever necessary. But don’t forget to customize their sizes in accordance with the overall design of your blog’s theme.
#5 Combine all visual contents
When you read a blog that contains only text-based contents, you’ll feel exhausted to remain there for long despite the articles being very informative.
This is same case with other contents like images, audios, videos, infographics and graphs. Human beings don’t love just one thing. They want many things being combined in good proportion.
So you must try to add images, audios, graphics and videos in one post. But remember, they should be related. Adding different kinds of unrelated visual contents will just make you a crazy blogger.
#6 Tempting Post Headlines
Using strong and high-valued tempting words in posts or pages headlines actually bring wonders in reducing the bounce rate.
The post titles are displayed in recommended posts, recent posts, popular posts, recent comments, related posts and even in next post navigation link.
Don’t avoid adding tempting words in titles. It’s to make your readers become more curious and then psychologically force them to open other articles.
#7 Display of Related Posts
Display of related or recommended posts actually offers ready choices for a reader to exploring other articles. This will make them remain longer browsing your blog.
There are many tools to facilitate bloggers in adding related posts or recommended posts. I recommend using Addthis or Shareaholic for this purposes. You can also find many plugins for this.
#8 Create Good Landing Page
What is a landing page? Google Dictionary defines it as a web page which serves as an entry point for a website or a particular section of a website. You can see the design of my landing page:
A landing page is not only a source of email list but also medium through which bloggers can make segmented offers and also do visitors fragmentation analysis. So having a clean, attractive and professional landing page is mandatory for a blog to reduce rate.
#9 Reduce number of Ads
In an attempt to reduce bounce rate, you shouldn’t get over money-driven and too promotional. At the end of the day, survival in blogging is a number of visits. And if visitors aren’t satisfied looking at the number of ads displayed in your blog, your blog won’t take too long to face a premature death.
Therefore, when you think of making money by displaying ads, you also have to look into whether your readers would get distracted or not. At the max, 2 sidebar ads seem fine for me.
#10 Improve Loading Speed
The world is becoming information loaded. Your readers don’t have a patience to wait when your blog loads. They have more than required number of choices. They’ll close a blog that needs so much time to load and open other blogs.
Read this Article on how to improve the loading speed of a website. Besides mentioned in that article, you can also consider deleting unwanted plugins, third party functionalities and also implement on-page SEO principles. You can also consider compressing images and other visual contents before uploading them.
#11 Make your blog Responsive
All the online content marketing efforts are now mobile oriented. Because it was found that on an average, people now use more of mobile phones for browsing internets than they use other bigger devices like desktops, laptops, palmtops, and tablets.
This means to bring more visitors and also reduce the bounce rate of your blog, your blog designs and layouts should be made in such a manner that it’s responsive in all ranges of devices.
#12 Add Search Button
Some visitors will be so impatient to search the information they require by manually moving from one page to another. They’ll simply give a search query in a search box.
One or more information will come if you have developed a good content. So to facilitate such kinds of visitors, you must add a search box. And add the box in a strategic location. Many experienced professional bloggers place it on the top of all the sidebar widgets or embed with primary or secondary navigation menu.
#13 Proper use of headings
There are different levels of headings in WordPress. It ranges from H1 to H6. The size of fonts also differs from one to another and in H1 being the largest. Using them wherever needed will not make your article more legible but will also impress your visitors on the first glance itself.
The different levels of heading are also to break up only text-oriented articles into various paragraphs covering a certain segmented area with the main post-title-focused area. Some bloggers also customize the designs of those headings and make them attractive.
#14 Leverage inter-posts Linking
This is one of the recommended methods that can be used by new bloggers in reducing the bounce rates of their blogs. Inter-posts linking helps readers to move from one post to another.
But you must choose only turbo, related, catchy and maximum-searched words to be anchored. You can also link a sentence to another post. Try to get into physiological workings of people while making inter-posts links. See my example: My journey into professional blogging+earnings. Don’t forget to set the opening of that link in a new tab.
#15 Don’t add pop-up forms+Ads
When you are seriously reading a website and suddenly a pop-up appears blocking that article, do you love that? Obviously, no. This is the case with your blog readers too.
Don’t add pop-up forms or ads or whatever that appear all of sudden distracting a reader. If you add a pop-up Google Adsense Ads, you are actually on a shortcut to blocking your Adsense account.
#16 Proper Post Segmentation
Readers won’t putting all articles together. They won’t love to read all. They don’t have time either. So segment your posts properly. This will divide posts based on their areas of focus or purposes.
Most bloggers do it using Post Categories. This means your post categories should have all the characters of making your readers remain psychologically curious and hooked.
#17 Add compelling CTA
If your readers are directly landing on your promotion page, make sure that your Call-to-action (CTA) stands out. It should be noticeably different from the background.
This means you must use different color or image combination for the background of your CTA. Otherwise, the possibility of your readers leaving long before even seeing your CTA will be very high.
#18 Make Internal moving Easy
Moving through your blog shouldn’t be laborious and time-consuming. Provide readers with the maximum ease of navigating from one article to another.
It’s therefore, adding of sitemaps, clear menu and pagination are recommended. You can also add ‘Back to Top’ or ‘Back to Bottom’ buttons to ensure ease in horizontal navigation.
#19 Latest Information
Indeed this should is the main objective of blogging; providing the latest information for our readers in areas they are interested in. Readers won’t feel interested to read outdated details.
I usually use Google Trends, Facebook trends and from a credible news; international and national alike. If you have articles that contain outdated information, you need to update them.
#20 Good English
Write all the articles following the principles of good English standard. Cross check different degrees of sentences and voices used before publishing a post. Take care of proper heading allocation, paragraphing and sentence structuring. Learn differences b/w similar words like special and especial, farther and further, and beside and besides etc.
To ensure my blog posts are grammatical errors free with proper usage of spellings and punctuation marks, I use Grammarly. It helps a lot. It works both offline as well as online writing activities.
#21 Add language Translator
Blogging itself is an online process of providing information to the global audience. Making your blog readable for people of every country and people knowing different languages is important.
On a serious note, readers will feel well-taken-care off when their language is given due consideration. For this, you can install a website translator tools. Google Website Translator is one of them. There are also many such tools. Add the best one.
#22 Less External Links
When a number of external links are more in your blog article, your readers will think that your article is just with information collected from different sources. They’ll the authenticity and originality. In some cases, it’ll be taken as a sign that they are better than you.
Though the external linkage is important, you must keep the number at the minimum. Once a reader clicks an external link and then opened that blog, there is very low possibility that he’ll return to your blog. Reminder: Always make an external link open in a new window.
#23 Make use of 404 Page
This is a page that displays a message of non-availability of queries/searches submitted by a reader. It’s a response from the hosting server actually. Some bloggers don’t use this to make readers navigate to other links despite a particular search wasn’t found.
404 error page should have some internal links, either to a homepage or a sitemap. I have linked my Homepage with Sitemap in my 404 Error Page. Click Here to check it. This indeed puts 404 error page into a strategic use.
#24 Update outdated Posts
Who will love reading an article that shares only outdated information? No one for sure. Everyone is in search of real-time fresh news and updates. Therefore, you must update those posts that were published before. Try adding some new updates.
Some bloggers resort into giving a warning which says that the article is these many years/months old and information shared may not be useful for a current situation. This though respects transparency, it also shows you’re being lazy. Old articles and pages must be updated with time.
#25 Add Live Chat Box
If your blogging niche is something in which your readers/clients often contact you, adding live chat box will make them feel well-taken-care. They don’t have to spend time in writing you emails after emails.
In WordPress, there are quite a number of third party plugins and software to facilitate adding of a live chat box. You can even consider adding one in your blog.
#26 Disable Autoplay Functionality
Some bloggers love adding welcome musical audio which automatically plays on opening it. This is quite annoying and a matter becomes worse when we cannot find a button to off immediately.
Some audios have high-pitched volume making embarrassed in front of friends while browsing. So to remain on a safer side and not to chase away new visitors immediately, better not add any auto-playable audios in your blog.
#27 Make some Offers
We have heard this proverb, ‘Hand that gives, gathers’. Offering something for free will make your readers happy. But that offer should be something that will help more readers.
Offer your best SEO checklist or well tested Google Adsense Income making strategy Ebook. Or you can help in getting the best tools required in blogging. Newbies will find you helpful. They will visit your blog for helps and also refer friends. This will not only reduce your bounce rate but will improve the brand.
#28 Add Surveys/Polls
Bloggers can also add Surveys or polls widget to make readers remain for more time in your time. But it’s assumed they will remain. If surveys or polls aren’t something in which they feel interested, an aim of reducing bounce rate won’t be realized.
Add star rating widgets, like buttons or thumb up or thumb down rating system in every post to rate them or in a sidebar to rate overall designs and contents of your blog. You can use Qualaroo for this purpose.
#29 Less No. Pages/Menu
The number of navigation menus or pages also affects an overall attractiveness of a blog. When the number is high, the blog doesn’t appear clean and professional.
Condense a number of menus at the max of 5. You can also use drop-down menu features. But the drop-down shouldn’t be so long that they’ll hide the main contents when hovered. In this case, 2-3 will be fine.
#30 Be Truthful
Don’t tell lies. And also don’t mention some tips which yourself hasn’t tested whether they actually work. This demands backing up your opinion-oriented advices or tips with facts and figures.
Try to give proofs when announcing your blogging income from various sources. This is already a suspicion prone area and you cannot risk by telling lies.
Conclusion
There are many tools to view the Bounce Rate of your blog. Google Analytics is one of them. Implement those tools and always regulate your bounce rate. If your bounce rate displayed comes more than 70%, you are already in danger zone. Make it lower than 50%.
Blogging experts say that 20-30% is the good bounce rate. This means you must maintain your blog’s bounce rate somewhere in this range. If you keep note of all above methods I have shared, I can guarantee that your bounce rate will be reduced my manifolds.
So, at last apart from those mentioned above, what methods you’ve implemented to address higher bounce rate? Or you can see your current bounce rate? Share with us.
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