Bounce rate is one of the commonly misunderstood metric with many
negative connotations. When you understand what truly constitutes bounce
rate, it is clear that a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad
thing.
A bounce means a single webpage visit. If a user clicks on a link to a
page on your site, spends five minutes reading that page, and then
exits your site, they’re a bounce. Furthermore, a user could find
exactly what they are looking for, have a great experience on your site,
and still be counted as a bounce.
Less bounces means more page views, which may translate into more
revenue, more engagement, or a stronger connection with readers. An
unusually high bounce rate is also a signal of poor user experience, so
it’s worth decreasing it to a point where you’re sure that your users
are ‘good bounces’, not bad ones.
1. Update your content on regular basis
Still have content from 2009 live telling people how to optimize
their Myspace page? You will want to fix that. Even in less extreme
cases, it’s important to keep old high-traffic posts up-to-date to keep
your bounce rate down.
2. Say NO to pop-ups
Generally, popups are awful for the user experience and should be
avoided at any costs. The only case where it is okay is when you are
using a tool like Bounce Exchange, which uses mouse tracking technology
to identify when a user is about to bounce, and then shows a popup to
reduce the likelihood of this. However, I would suggest that this is a
bad user experience.
3. Write shorter paragraphs
Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, which is why it is important to write concisely and in short sentences.
4. Translate your site for international traffic
If you website is written in English but you also receive a lot of
traffic from countries like Japan, Israel, and China; than you should
think of translate your website for international traffic. You can
install WPML to translate your site into a few different languages.
5. Make your website search more prominent
Many people are search-orientated and these users will look for a
website search box as soon as they enter a site. Don’t make it difficult
for your website visitor to search for what they are looking for.
6. Make your 404 page more useful
Google explicitly advises that your 404 error page should be useful
in helping people find what they were looking for. They also advise
using the enhanced 404 widget to include a search box on your 404 page.
Lots of broken links will cause a poor user experience, driving your bounce rates up. Using the Webmaster Tools crawl error report, or a scraper like Screaming Frog, identify all of the broken links on your website and fix as many of them as possible.
8. Make all external links open in a new window
For blogs, it is likely that a large portion of your site bounces are
coming from people clicking on external links in your posts. If you are
using WordPress, there is a plugin that will automatically open all of your external links in a new tab.
9. Improve your page loading speed
57% of users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to
load. Therefore, if you want to reduce the bounce rate, you should
improve the loading speed of your site. There are various online tools
like alexa.com that will calculate the exact loading speed of your site.
10. Put banners and hyperlink to existing content
Always put eye-catchy banners and inter-link your content to the older posts to retain your website visitors.
