Did you know that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing pay close attention to your bounce rates? Yes -they do. That is why you too should take time and pay closer attention to your bounce rate. The question is how do you decrease the bounce rate?
What is Bounce Rate?
According to Google, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
According to Alexa, my bounce rate at 37% has decreased by 25%(at the time of writing this article). That looks horrible but when I started, bounce rate was once at 98.2%. That was mainly because I was using the domain as a squeeze page and driving lots of traffic to it. Now I am trying to do some little changes and I am seeing some awesome results even though I have been down and not writing new posts for a good number of days.
Below are 5 ways you can use to decrease your bounce rate
#1. Look for the right traffic
The number one reason for high bounce rate is acquiring the wrong set of eye balls to your blog. Targeted traffic is what you should be looking for. It is better to get 100 targeted visitors than 1000 non-targeted visitors. I do use Facebook groups for traffic and one simple method I use to decrease my bounce rates is to post only relevant links to the groups. For example, If I do a post about blogging tips, I will only post the link to Blogging Groups and not Freelancing Groups.
#2. Become mobile friendly
I am not using a detailed statistics plugin that shows me how many visitors come from mobile but when i configured the mobile version, I didn’t just see a decrease in bounce rate but also an increase in traffic. Not really sure how that came about but I think the mobile visitors must be sharing.
#3. Avoid poor designs
You don’t need to pay a hefty amount to hire a designer or purchase a premium template to have a good web or blog design. All you have to do is arrange things properly. Let the navigation be stupidly simple. People hate to look for where to go. You should also avoid placing ads in positions that will distract your readers, because they will follow the advert and leave your blog.
#4: Avoid popup ads
Many people find popup ads very annoying, and if you don’t have loyal readers yet, avoid them. I just added a popup, and I have not noticed any unusual change. I think it is because I am giving away a free gift instead of an annoying popup advert.
#5: Make use of internal links
Everyone Talks about this and sometimes when you are just starting, you have little to no posts to link to. What I am doing now is to go back to the older posts and add relevant internal links to newer posts. You can also use old blog posts for more traffic.
I will surely write part 2 of this post with any other tips to decrease bounce rate as I get to know and experience them. Thanks for reading and please share your views or tips in the comment area.
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