How to Decrease the Bounce Rate on Your Blog

Don’t you want users to visit your site and keep reading your content?

 If someone visits your site and exits without opening the second page, then they are known as a bounced visitor.

 For every 100 visitors that come to your site, if 40 of them decide to leave, then the bounce rate would be 40% . With a high bounce rate like that, you are risking the chance of losing potential customers.

 How does one know what their site’s bounce rate is? Google Analytics has all the answers for you.

 Here is the bounce rate of one of my niche sites.

Bounce rates will tend to be high when a web site is slow. In this post, I will explain how to increase the speed of your site, using my website as a case study.

 Displayed in the graph below, are the average bounces rates according to the various types of websites.

Normally, a blog will receive a 40-60% bounce rate. If your website is within the same range there are different ways to decrease your bounce rate.

Throughout this article, I am going to outline some tips that will help decrease your bounce rate significantly. I have tried these techniques before on some of my niche blogs and the results are astounding.

1. Improve loading time

In the digital  world of the Internet, you are not the only one trying to solve the bounce rate dilemma. If your site takes too much time to load, visitors will bounce back to Google to search for another site.

That is why loading time is of the utmost concern for any site. In the case of SEO, search engines will rank your site accordingly amongest competitors, because they are factoring in loading time.

This image below depicts this issue.

Here, you can see how the loading time of your site affects your bounce rate. If this is the case, then your rankings in the search results will fall.

 Loading time also tends to affect conversion rates. This graph below depicts how a quick load time will lead to higher conversion rates. The optimal loading time is from one to two seconds.

Image Credits: econsultancy.com

Here are some tips to improve your site’s loading speed.

1. Use a fast loading theme: Fancy themes for your website are not always necessary. Keep it as simple as possible. Before applying any theme, you should test how it affects the web site’s loading time

2. Remove Unnecessary Scripts: Unnecessary scripts include the following: custom scripts, plugins, and extensions.
3. Use CDN: Content delivery networks like Cloudflare work the best. It will improve the loading time of your site significantly.
   

   2. Interlinking

   Interlinking will help improve your rankings on search engines and significantly decrease your bounce rate. This will help prevent visitors from bouncing back to Google or other search engines. For example, if you are writing about “Best WordPress themes,” you can link that article to WordPress related articles.

   If you want to rank another article related to keywords that are relevant to your page you may want to use anchor text. In addition, you can also show related posts at the bottom of every article using the plugin like Zemanta related posts.

   3. Target Long Tail Keywords

   Last but not least, targeting long tail keywords will help you reduce high bounce rates. This is because long-tail keywords will send you targeted traffic, which will only get bounced if it was something that a visitor was not exactly looking for. However, if you rank highly in long-tail keywords, odds are you will receive traffic from people looking for something specific.

   For example, keywords like “Luxury watches for men” is better than “Luxury watches”, especially if your website is targeting a male demographic that is in search of something more specific. Of Course, various long-tail keywords exist depending upon who you are targeting. It is better to target multiple long-tail keywords containing a large search volume instead of targeting single short keywords with a large search volume.
   In conclusion,  a website’s bounce rate is something you should try to reduce. If it’s higher than desired, you are going to lose potential customers. If you use the tactics I have outlined above which are improving loading time, interlinking, and targeting long-tail keywords in a combination, it should produce solid results.

   Let us know if you have any questions or comments in the section below.