Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. It is considered as one of the most important factor for the success of a website. Reducing website’s bounce rate helps in improving Google ranking.
Hence, I’m sharing few tips that will help you reduce your website’s bounce rate or you may refer this blog to better understand “Bounce Rate – An important metrics in Google analytics” before fixing it up.
Avoid Popups
It is one of the most discussed topics among advertisers that whether to use pop up or not. After various tests and experiments it has been observed that users find it annoying. Most of the time when users visit any website and popups keep disrupting them, they tend to leave the site which affects the bounce rate.
Popups are not bad always, while it can be harmful for some sites, for others it can be beneficial as well. One of such examples are “Exit lead boxes” (explained in latter section of this article).
Getting confused whether you should keep it or not? You can always run a test and check which version works the best for you. You can also set a timer for your popups, so that it doesn’t appear as soon as any person visit your site.
Exit Lead Boxes
This is a great way to retain visitors who are about to leave your website. When a visitor visits your site and makes a move to click away, a popup form will be triggered as below –
You can check this on Neil Patel’s Blog
This gives you a last chance to get the best content in front of your customers.
Improve Navigation
If your website doesn’t have good navigation on your website, chances are more that they will leave your site without visiting other pages of your website. You need to make sure that a person can easily navigate your site to find what they are looking for.
Navigation should be direct and simple.
There are various heatmap tools that can help you know how your navigation is working like
• luckyorange
• crazyegg
Call to Action
It’s very important to have proper call to action for your website. In spite of having very good website you can lack in gaining attention of your customers if don’t have a compelling call to action on your website. It’s also very crucial to optimize your CTA because even a small text change to your call action can make a huge difference.
Open External Links in New Window
Opening external links in new window helps reducing the bounce rate. When users visit any site they tend to open external link in new window. This will help your users see the content they are interested in and increase the chances of your visitors to return back to your site.
Search Functionality
It is very obvious for any user to bounce back to Google search if he doesn’t find an answer to the query. But what if your website has a “search functionality”? This will make them search for their answer one more time before bouncing back to Google. This functionality can be very beneficial for those who have a complex site.
Use Content Recommendations
Using content recommendations or related post gives users a reason to spend more time on your blog. It helps visitors to view other post related to the topic they are searching for. There are various options using which you can show related post in your site. There are plugins like YARP which shows the related post. There are other options as well in wordpress that helps you show related post by category. Most of the sites that has implemented this has seen increase in traffic and improved bounce rate.
Interactive Sidebar
Interactive sidebar can play important role in increasing traffic and reducing bounce rate. It helps you to show your popular post in the sidebar. You can even customize it to show the popular post by week or month. Using this other category pages can also be shown.
Interlinking your Posts
Interlinking other posts within the post content, helps in increasing page views and also optimize your SEO value. It is helpful especially when your site has large number of articles. Also there are various plugins available in the market that automatically link keywords in wordpress. If you are doing it manually, focus on relevance and a logical linking strategy. Internal linking not only helps you in increasing page views but also helps in reducing bounce rate.
Mobile Site
As number of users accessing web from mobile devices is growing day by day, it has become very important to optimize your site for them. Failing in doing so can make your customers leave your site which can lead to increased bounce rate. Apart from the looks of your website on mobile devices, it is equally important for it to load faster as well.
Zero Bounce Rate Wordpress Plugin
When you get organic traffic and visitor tries to leave the site by clicking back button, this plugin redirects the visitor to the page of your choice. It can be a subscription page, it can be any landing page or any other website. In this way you can make extra profit from your site.
Inclosing
Analyze your website’s current bounce rate and find the opportunities for improvement. You may follow these tips to reduce your website’s bounce rate while increasing the conversion rate. Last but not least, I will say have patience and try the new practices don’t just get stuck with the old ones because improving bounce rate is a consistent gradual process.
#Reference
– 13 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Your Conversions
Annu Singh
Annu is B.E Information Science and is currently a search specialist at Megistron Media. She specializes in campaign audits & management, execution and creating solutions for global clients.