Simple Ways To Improve Your Bounce Rate

Improving bounce rate can dramatically improve the overall performance of a site.

From building a stronger community to boosting CTR, bounce can be the difference between the success or failure of your campaign.

So what can we do to improve our sites bounce rate? Well, there are hundreds, if not infinite amount of ways to improve bounce rates, the only limit is our time and imagination. But, to save a bit of time and effort here are 10 tried and tested ways of improving your bounce rate.

Add a Search Box

If users cant find what they are looking for on the page they're on they will often turn towards the search box to hunt down the info they need.

Adding a search box to your site is a must. Having a search box basically allows your audience to tailor your site to suit there needs and head directly to what they want.

Display Related Posts.

I've touched on this in a previous post. Displaying related content on our pages is a great way to encourage people to click around. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to add a related posts widget/plugin to the end of your posts. For more on improving bounce with related posts click here.

Split Writing Into Smaller Parts

Reading through line after line of text with no paragraphs, heading or basic formatting is just plain boring and many people wont have the patients to see it through to the end, so they leave (hey! don't leave lol).

Try to create small chunks of info that makes your visitors want to read the next chunk and so on. Getting people interested in your writing will definitely keep them on site.

Page Load Time

Unless the user is a big fan, they are not going to stick around to wait for a slow ass site to load. If our sites are taking longer than 10 seconds to load, we need to take steps to reduce the loading time.

Cut out unnecessary images, heavy scripts and generally cut objects from your page that is not
needed. Do you really need that Gangnam Style GIF jiggling in the sidebar?

Page Design

The design or the look of a site plays a big part on the bounce rate. If visitors don't like what they see when they land on a page they will not stick around to look through the other pages, regardless of how good the content is. Take a look at some of the top sites out there. What can we take from their design to improve our own sites?

Display popular posts

Showing popular posts is similar to showing related post. But instead of of information related to a post, you are showing what other visitors find interesting. For some it may indicate that its worth reading. The fact that a page is 'popular', is enough to make some people want to read it.

Just like related posts, there are plenty of widgets and plugins to help you out.

Open external links in a new window

External links are a bit of a touchy subject. On one hand you want to offer your visitors relevant and useful information which at times means sending them to outside content, and in the other you want your visitors to stay on your site. Right?

Opening external links in a new window allows us to take advantage of both sides. Our visitors can view outside content but at the same time stay on our pages.

I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions just leave a comment. Thanks for reading

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Lower Your Blogs Bounce Rate With Related Posts

As we know, without traffic a web site is virtually useless so we take huge steps to increase our visitor counts. But a lot of us don't take into consideration how active these visitors are on site, after all, there is no point having lots of hits if know ones reading your stuff, right?

When looking at how visitors interact with your site the bounce rate becomes a very useful bit of info, and by knowing the facts you can work towards improving your stats. CTR a little low? You might want to check your bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate, put simply, is the percentage of bounced visits to your site.They jump in, they bounce out.
This is how Google describes bounced visits ...

• A user clicks on a link deep into your site sent by a friend, reads the information on the page, and closes the browser.
• A user comes to your home page, looks around for a minute or two, and immediately leaves.
• A user comes directly to a reference page on your site from a web search, leaves the page available in the browser while completing other tasks in other browser windows and the session times out.

A high bounce rate means people visit your page and leave almost straight away, a low bounce rate shows that your visitors are actually reading, participating and clicking around your site.
So you can see why it could be important to know this stat.

Improve Bounce Rate with related posts

To improve bounce rate we need to give users a reason to continue digging around our site and one of the easiest ways to do this is to place a related posts/content widget below your posts.

Related posts/content widgets usually display the title and sometimes a short summary of maybe 4 or 5 posts. Using thumbnails is great way of catching peoples attention. Check out the example image below...

By offering further information related to the content of the page or even something that looks interesting to read, you are not only supplying readers with a wealth of information you are keeping them engaged and more importantly on site.

Top related post widgets.

If you are interested in improving your bounce rate with related posts, here are a few third party related posts widgets you might want to check out...

LinkWithin

Link within is the related post widget I use here on VirtuaCash (may change soon). It is very simple to install on most popular platforms and you don't even have to sign up to use it.

NRelate

NRelate is very similar to linkwithin. You don't need to sign up to use it, although signing up gives you more advanced options. NRelate also allows you to make some money from your links.

Outbrain

Out brain is a popular widget that's great for customising using css. It also offers you the chance to make some money from your links, like NRelate.

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