Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which a person left your site from your entrance or landing page. They did not pass go, they did not collect $200, they visited one page, that page only and immediately left without clicking through to another page on your site. Your bounce rate ultimately is a great metric to evaluate visitor quality and the effectiveness of your content, design, layout and navigation.
A high bounce rate generally indicates that your site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and take the desired action or convert. Your bounce rate is a great indicator of how successful your website or blog really is, so at the end of the day the goal is to decrease your site’s bounce rate.
Can you stop your bounce rate altogether?
That my friends is simply not possible. People will close your pages and not everyone will like your content. You just can’t please everyone, but there are several things you can do to dramatically reduce your site’s bounce rate. David Wood from workwithdavidwood.com has put together a great article about some of the things you can test to help improve your bounce.
Excerpts from the original article:
What’s a good bounce rate?
Well, anything below 50%. To be honest with you, most people have 80% or more. Especially as your site grows, you’ll start to attract a ton of random visitors. You’ll receive completely untargeted traffic that will of course have no interest in your content. It happens… and there’s not much you can do about it. That’s just Google doing its thing sending you a bunch of untargeted traffic.
So here’s a short list of simple ways to decrease your bounce rate:
1. Get Rid Of Popups (Distractions)
Popups work and they convert very well. Unfortunately, the majority of your visitors will disagree. By using a popup you’ll immediately increase your bounce rate by 10%-30%.
3. Killer Content
After getting people to your website, you need to seduce them with killer content. Content that will knock the socks off of everything else out there. While some people hate “different”, it’s definitely going to reduce your bounce rate.
5. Easy To Read And Navigate
Make sure your content is easy to read and make sure your website is easy to navigate. If visitors can’t easily browse through your pages or posts…they won’t and they’ll just leave.
- Add related and best posts widget.
- display a list of your best and most popular posts.
- display a list of relevant pages/posts.
- display banners that link to your other posts/pages instead of external sites.
- focus all of your energy on getting your visitors to click through to other pages.
- link to your other pages contextually. Throughout your post/page content, link to other pages.
2. Good Layout & Design
It’s usually the obvious things that make the biggest difference. Clearly, if you have a good layout and design, visitors will stay longer. And… They’ll be far more likely to read and buy your stuff. …having an attractive design should be your top priority.
4. Be Specific
Whatever you do, don’t go too off topic! Give people exactly what they want. …make your content extremely title specific and vice versa. If your title doesn’t explain/talk about exactly what your content is all about, it will result in them closing the page.
Follow all of the above tips and you’ll decrease your bounce rate dramatically.
View the original article by David Wood from workwithdavidwood.com
