How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

Blogging can be a hobby . . . but it can also be a lucrative career! When you’re running a blog as a business, you have to treat it as a business. There are all sorts of factors that contribute to your success—some of those factors are creative and some of them are technical. 

One of those key technical elements that make a big difference in your blog’s growth is bounce rate. Knowing what your bounce rate is and what is contributing to it can help you form a strategy that’ll keep people on your website longer—giving you more time to wow them with your amazing content! Here’s how you can lower your bounce rate and take your blog to the next level:

How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

If you were a door-to-door saleswoman for your blog, a high bounce rate would be like potential readers shutting the door in your face before you can even tell them what your blog is all about—and before you can wow them with your charm! When you reduce your bounce rate, it’s like getting to step inside, connect with your visitor, and ultimately persuade them to be a lifelong follower. 

That’s the goal right??? But, we can only make website visitors into readers if they give us a little time. So, you need to lower your average bounce rate. We’ll get into how to do that!

What is Bounce Rate?

What Is A Bounce Rate?

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that go on your website and leave after viewing only a single page. You can find your current bounce rate on Google Analytics (or Universal Analytics). A good bounce rate is 50% or lower, but of course, we want that percentage as low as it can go! 

A single-page session usually means the visitor is not buying in, so we need to fix whatever is causing the reader to leave before they’ve really dug into your work. We all know with more time they’d be sold!!!

How To Decrease Your Bounce Rate 

Make your pages load faster. 

A huge contributing factor to a high bounce rate is page load time. If your page takes 2 seconds to load, your bounce rate is usually 9%, however, that number jumps to 38% if it takes 5 seconds to load. Whoa! Big difference. 

To make your website load faster, find a better hosting service, optimize your website, cut back on plugins, and clear your site cash. You could also just go straight to your website developer and ask how you can increase your site performance!  

Improve the mobile experience.

About half of internet users are now browsing on mobile devices. That means the mobile user experience is JUST as important as your desktop UX. So, test out all your website features on mobile to make sure it all works super well. If the site doesn’t function properly, readers are going to bounce.  

Refresh your web design. 

Appearance also contributes to higher bounce rates. If your site is looking drab, dated, or amateur, give it a facelift! An aesthetic look and readable text will capture your visitor’s attention better and give them the sense that you’re credible and professional. If you want more detail, read this post on SEO-friendly web design

Include plenty of internal links. 

Sometimes readers just visit one page on your site, because they get everything they were looking for and don’t realize you could offer them more. In every blog post, add plenty of internal links to other posts to keep readers reading! 

Add appealing calls-to-actions. 

To catch visitors’ focus and time right away, try a call-to-action! Offer the readers something in exchange for their email, so you can keep delivering content to them even when they decide to leave your site. You could give them a printable quiz, mini-course, discount code, and more to sweeten the deal and increase your conversion rate. Read our post on creating a good call-to-action for more tips!

Showcase your credibility.

Website visitors are looking for the most credible person to answer their questions and recommend their products. Web design definitely helps your brand appear professional, but you can do even more to convince readers you’re a trustworthy source! Add testimonials, awards, reviews, and more to the main page to show readers what your content is worth. 

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate infographics for How To Lower Your Bounce Rate

Make navigation easier.

One key element of a positive user experience is easy navigation. You need a simple main menu with simple drop-downs to keep everything organized. Oh, and don’t forget that search bar! If your readers don’t have to endlessly scroll to find what they’re looking for, they’re much more likely to stick around and read more. 

Rewrite your metadata. 

Sometimes the reason bounce rates are high is because you’re attracting the wrong visitors. Think about it like this, when your content is search engine optimized, it’ll populate at the top of the search result pages. The higher your rank, the more likely your blog post is to get picked!

On the search engine results page, your content is given a preview through a title tag and meta description. By reading this, visitors will determine if your content is right for them. So, if your metadata doesn’t represent your blog post accurately, then you could be attracting visitors who aren’t actually looking for your post. At the same time, you may not be bringing the readers that do want your content. Edit up that metadata to reach the right people! 

Add eye-catching visuals. 

People love visuals. Add high-quality photos, infographics, and illustrations to the landing pages to engage readers right away. These could also help showcase your brand’s tone, purpose, and niche to help readers decide if your blog is the one they’re looking for. 

Incorporate more landing pages. 

One landing page doesn’t always fit all visitors—this is especially true if you cover a lot of topics on your blog. Developing multiple landing pages can be a smart way to feed website visitors the exact content they’re looking for.

So, if you’re a lifestyle blog and pull in some traffic from a social media post about weeknight dinners, you can take those potential followers right to the recipe section of your blog and offer them a downloadable pantry inventory checklist. Or, if you draw visitors from an OOTD reel, you can take them right to the style and wardrobe category. 

Try out multiple landing pages if you’re struggling with bounce rate and have a diverse blog! 

Keep your blog updated.

If visitors jump onto your site and see the last post was two years ago, they’ll assume the website is effectively dead. Even if you’re super active in other ways, the visitors probably won’t see it if your blog posts aren’t up-to-date. So, make sure you’re still writing and uploading SEO-friendly articles regularly! 

We understand all of this can be a lot to manage. So, if you’re struggling to keep up with your blog and site health, consider joining our Strategize Package where we take care of all the SEO to-dos that keep your website ranking high! We also have a Copywriting Add-On where we will write your blog posts for you—with your voice and topics! Outsourcing some of these tasks can really help boost your business. 

Use these strategies to reduce your bounce rate and gain more followers!

In the blogging world, your website is EVERYTHING. It’s totally a reflection of you and it’s where all of your most important brand content resides. So, you want website visitors to stick around for a while, get a sense of who you are, and ultimately fall in love with your content! To keep them with you, lower that bounce rate using these tips. 

For more ways to grow your brand, check out the InfluencerSEO blog where we share expert advice on all things blogging! You can also find us on Instagram and participate in our free SEO evaluation! We’ll go over bounce rate, monthly page views, top posts, and more. Hopefully, this recommended content will keep readers on our website a little longer too! Anything to reduce that bounce rate, right???

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