A high bounce rate is a nightmare to webmasters. When a visitor gets to our blog, we want them to stay awhile to see and appreciate all the hardwork we put in there, we want them to read our articles one after the other or just to see all the good things our brands have to offer.
Unfortunately for most of us, these visitors abondon our blogs in a hurry just seconds after getting there. Precisely, this is what leads to a high bounce rate.
There is a relationship between your bounce rate and search engine ranking. Google has confirmed that it considers how much time your visitors spend on your blog as an indication of relevance and usefulness. If your visitors click the back button seconds after landing on your blog, it's considered that you don't have engaging contents and this leads to bad search engine ranking.
What Bounce Rate?
Google defines bounce rate as "the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors." What this simply means is that Google wants your visitors to stay longer on your blog and if they don't, Google simply demotes your blog on the search engine pages.
Let's look at the major reasons why your visitors zoom off.
Boring contents:
This is simple. People want to be entertained and informed. If your articles are uninteresting and without any value to your visitors, then your blog's bounce rate will be very high.
If you are the only one writing the contents of your blog, it's time you seek help. Bring on board exprienced writers, although this comes at a cost. If you are running on a tight budget or cannot afford to hire, read books/articles on content writing. People love articles written in form of stories with pictures and graphics.
Blog takes too much to load:
Studies have shown that over forty percent of visitors will leave your blog if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. Scary, isn't it? Slow load time is traffic killer. Internet users seem to always be in a hurry and have little patient.
Find out why your blog loads slowly. These steps can help you rectify things.
Photos are awesome, your visitors will love to see lots of them, but if you don't optimse them, they will slow down your blog.
Hosting: Please don't jump into hosting your blog with service provider just because their fees are cheap. This might ruin your blog on the long run. Look for a good hosting provider.
Theme: many wordpress theme are bloated and come with many features that you can never use. Keep it simple. The twenty fifteen theme,which is default WP theme, is very lightweight and speedy.
Caching plugin: Make sure you have an effective cache installed on your blog. This plugin improves the speed of your blog. I recommend W3 Total Cache, it has all the important features and very very easy to install.
Optimize WP database: This is very important. Use a plugin called WP-optimize to clean up your wp database of unwanted files,spam,drafts and so on.
There are many more you can do to speed up your blog but start with these steps mentioned above.
Poor Design:
Your visitors are going to run away if your blog is not properly designed. This make them lose trust in you and your contents. If you have ads all over the place, conflicting colours, unreadable fonts and so on, their first impression of you is that you don't know what you are doing. They hardly stick around.
People judge you first by what they see. This is called first impression, if your blog design is great, people think that you are great. Your blog's design doesn't have to be super fanciful just make sure that the following are in order:
All contents must be categorised.
Use readable fonts, everything must be tidy.
Use infographics if you have a lot of data.
Use an effective theme.
Non interlinked contents:
If you provide your visitors with links leading to your other contents, there is high chance that they are going to be interested in reading them. This makes them stay longer. Internal links are very important in reducing bounce rate, and it also helps in easy naviagtion of your blog.
In conclusion:
It's worthwhile for webmasters to learn the art of reducing the bounce rate of their blogs. Although no one knows the actual figure but we know that anything less than fifty percent is ok. Apart from the bounce rate, we need to make people to stay on our blogs and read all the awesome contents we work real hard to create. If not, what's the point.....................
http://onlineprenuer.com/reduce-high-bounce-rate/
