Bounce Rate is the term used to describe the percentage of visitors that enters and leaves on the same page on your site.
Site owners want to keep the bounce rate at a down low as much as possible. A high bounce rate indicates that your visitors are just going to the landing page and leaving immediately without browsing your site.
Hence, this could mean that your visitors do not find any valuable information on your site. As a result, you are unsuccessful in telling them more about your site and eventually, making conversions.
The bounce rate lessens if the visitor chooses to continue to another page in your site. And this should be one of your goals – make them stay longer.
A tool that can help measure your site’s bounce rate is Google Analytics. This tool tracks visitor statistics so that you’ll have a good idea of where the problem lies.
In addition, the report you’ll get from the tool will also indicate the areas of your site that will need improvement (speed, navigation, content, etc.).
1. Promote the Most Popular Articles
First, how can you make your visitors stay in your website? An excellent idea is to promote your most popular articles.
Show the links in the sidebar or in whatever way possible, as long as it is highly visible and noticeable on the landing page.
The idea here is that you are promoting articles that are in your site as well. Therefore, the visitor will stay on your site longer and lower the bounce rate at the same time.
One may also call this “internal linking” but for this approach to be effective, the links should be strategically placed and you must make sure that the internal links are properly linked.
Check broken internal links and correct them immediately. Further, use the right SEO anchor text and only link pages that are highly related to one another.
2. Display Related Posts
This next approach to lowering your website’s bounce rate is also related to internal linking. Here, you must display related posts under the current post.
Doing so will keep the reader within your site as he or she feels the need to take a look at the related post. Thus, making them stay longer and lowering your bounce rate.
3. Show Community Participation
When it’s a visitor’s first time to visit your site, one of their thoughts would be “Am I at the right place”? With plenty more websites they can visit, they’d want to make sure that they aren’t wasting time in yours.
So, the third approach is to show them that they are at the right place. A way to do that is to showcase the community participation in your website or blog site. You can put a Facebook box that shows the profiles of the visitors that have liked, shared or commented on your site.
When a new visitor sees that there is an active community that participates on your website, they’d instantly get the feeling that they are in the right place and they can be a part of an active community too. Hence, making them want to stay and explore your site better.
4. Use Subscription Boxes
The fourth approach is to use subscription boxes and this isn’t something new to websites and blogs. The whole idea of using subscription boxes is to get people to go on board, sign up and send them email newsletters.
As a result, the visitors are more likely to come back and check out what’s new on your site upon receiving the newsletter.
5. Use A Quality WordPress Theme
While most of the advice you’ll get is about content, we shall not overlook the importance of site design here.
The last approach to lowering your site’s bounce rate is to use a quality WordPress theme design. No one would like to stay and browse a website that has dull colors, poor navigation and contain truckload of spam ads.
Your website should look appealing so that visitors wouldn’t mind staying a bit longer.
6. Loading Time
Loading time is another major metric that you need to analyze to understand why some visitors are bouncing back after landing on your website. If you website contains too many images or loads of unnecessary codes, it is quite obvious that your website will take really long time to get loaded. Use some tools like Bitcatcha, gtmetrix, pingdom, WebPagetest etc to figure out the loading time of the website and whether you need to change your hosting company to speed up your website.
