There are many visitors who visit only one page of the website and bounce back. There could be many reasons visitors might bounce back from the websites. To keep the visitors engage into the websites, there should be attractive and eye catching content. As Content is a king of marketing.
But sometimes, making a good content might not work properly. There are many ways through which bounce rate can be reduced.
The following factors should help to reduce bounce rates, but also should serve to keep users on site for a longer period –
- Make sure your pages load quickly
No-one likes slow loading pages, so make sure websites loads as fast as it can, on mobile and desktop. Whatever the exact time, if a site feels slow to load, people will be thinking about bouncing. This is important from a user experience perspective, but also forms part of Google’s mobile ranking factors. The old rule of thumb from Jakob Nielsen was that users would wait two seconds for a page to load before abandoning the idea.
- Avoid Clickbait
The main purpose of this type of Content is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link, which will lead to a particular web page. Nowadays Clickbait is common place in most of the websites. Essentially, none of these posts are likely to deliver on the promise of the headline. The content needs to be relevant to the headline, or else people will bounce quickly.
- Break Up the Text
Readers are more interested in paragraph after paragraph of black text on a white background. It’s mind numbing and disinteresting. If website is in long-form content with lots of text, readers will bounce back the website.
- Avoid huge pop-ups and annoying ads
Serving users with a huge pop-up as soon as they enter the site is a great way to make them hit the back button.
- Use internal linking
Providing users with links to other interesting articles which are relevant to the one which users are reading increases the likelihood that they’ll hang around for longer, and reduces those bounce rates.
- Article formatting
It is very important, as people make quick judgments based on format of the article or page they clicked on and wonder how much work it will be to read and consume. A wall of text with few paragraphs and no visual stimulus will deter many people just because it seems like hard work to digest. On the other hand, if website has a clear sub-headings, bullet points, images and charts, and bold text on key stats and points then it makes even longer articles seem more appealing.
Of course, the content is King, but first impressions matter in this respect.
- Mobile friendly
Nowadays most of the visitors prefer to read or visit on mobile, as it’s a portable device which can be used any time.
- Make calls to action
It has to be clear when and where customers need to go next to buy a product, retrieve a quote,
Here are some great pointers:
- Wording – The wording should be obvious what will happen if a user presses a button, such as ‘Add to cart’ or ‘Checkout.’
- Colours – Contrast is key. Many sites tend to go for yellow or green, but what works for one site doesn’t necessarily work for another.
- Size – Make call action buttons big enough to be seen easily, but not too big.
- Placement – Buttons should be placed where users’ eyes are likely to be as they scan around the page.
- Adapt for different devices – Calls to action should work across various mobile devices as well as desktop.
- Make Navigation Intuitive
Best way to reduce bounce rate is by making navigation as intuitive as possible. There are websites that say “Back to Top” with arrows pointing up. These simple elements give the reader the chance to revert back to the top of article without having to manually scroll all the way. It takes virtually no time to implement, but can dramatically lower bounce rates.
- Never Stop Optimizing
No matter what’s the bounce rate, optimization of the website can’t be stopped. Keep looking for areas where it can be improved and don’t settle for anything less than perfect.
Those are the mixture of methods for persuading users to stay longer on the website, and to explore further.
The keywords is a key to reduce bounce rates, as they need to interact with your site, but the page they land on creates that all-important first impression. If the first page doesn’t do its job in terms of delivering relevance to the user and avoiding obvious annoyances, then there’s little chance users will want to stick around.
Bounce rates are useful, but only used alongside other metrics like time on page and viewers of multiple pages.
