This is a guest post by Usman Khan who owns a Technology Focused Rise Dream Blog and through this post is giving us tips to reduce bounce rate of our blog or website.
Nowadays blogging is turning out to be an easy way for bloggers to express their thoughts and at the same time earn money. A lot of bloggers write meaningful posts that are meant to convey a message towards the potential readers but they fail keeping their visitors engaged on their blog.
The high numbers of quality blogs available on a single topic are creating some traffic problems especially for the new bloggers. It is essential for a blogger to understand the importance of persuading a visitor in spending more time on a blog.
One of the traffic issues new bloggers are confronted with is the high bounce rate of their blog. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors towards a blog or website who exit the site without bothering to view more then a single page within a time session.
The high percentage of bounce rate in the website analytics report is alarming for bloggers.
Here Are Some Tips For Bloggers To Reduce Bounce Rate Of Their Blog:
- Attract The Right Visitors
A lot of bloggers are found committing this simple mistake. The website should be optimized for search engines in a way that the visitors having interest in the topic enters the website. Ranking higher for a keyword is not that important as it is to rank higher for the right keyword. Even if a blogger ranks high for a search result it is a mere possibility that the visitor exits the blog from the entry page.
This early exit by the visitors affects the earning capacity of a blog. For instance, a food focused blog ranks higher for say “kitchen crockery” then it is a possibility for a user who is searching for “list of cheap and durable crockery” may leave the website without viewing any other posts that are pertinent to cooking recipes.
- Give The User’s What They Want
A blogger should think for himself as a visitor. Only then he will realize what content he want from a blog. Lets suppose a visitor wants to search for the review of a mobile phone then the blogger should estimate the quantity and layout of content the user wants.
Surely the user would look for a list of features within the mobile phone arranged in a table format and then a review of those features with sub headings and clear pictures. Injection of video review in the post will allow the user evaluate the suitability of the mobile phone model according to his needs.
Now if a user is on the blog for reading out a special review of specific mobile phone model then the next thing he would want is the
“Comparison of that mobile phone model with another model within the same price range”.
So the blogger should post the comparison and should try to display that post in the related posts space that should be kept just below the end of the post. Social bookmarking plugins should exist in a blog toolbar so that if a user finds the content useful he may refer that to his firends and acquaintances.
- Internal Linking
To boost user’s interest in a website a blogger should try interlinking between blog posts. A blogger should give references for his previous posts about the same topic. A blogger should avoid repeating the content that he has already posted and instead he should include a hyperlink towards the post that is already covered so that the user’s start browsing the website.
- Navigation Menu
The categories and pages of the blogs should be grouped together in a navigation menu. A blogger should place his navigation menu within the reach of a new user. The best place to include a navigation menu is at the top of the page or at the left side of the page. The navigation menu should consist of most viewed categories and no more then 8 parent categories should be listed in the navigation menu.
- Size Of The Page
With the increasing globalization a lot of visitors face time constraints. They expect a website to load quickly and offer their desired information concisely.
Advertisements take time to load so they should be placed with planning at those areas where the user may not get disturbed by the ads. Moreover excessive advertisements should be avoided. The content should be informative, authentic, precise, well-arranged, free from grammatical mistakes, convincing, comprehensible and should have honest opinions and real facts.
- Design
The design of the blog is another factor that determines the fate of the blog. A lot of bloggers create a very unique and attractive theme but start distributing that theme to other bloggers just for the sake of a single backlink that in most cases bloggers don’t get due to plagiarism. The design of the blog should be unique that means the theme of the blog should not resemble the theme of any other popular blog in that niche.
The bloggers should avoid using “times new roman” font style and should optimize their website keeping their font size medium and attractive. The main page of the blog should feature title, thumbnails and excerpt describing the latest and featured posts.
- Interact With Your Visitors
Interaction with your visitors is also vital aspect of successful blogging. The writing style of the blogger should be moderate in a sense that the experts and beginners both could easily understand what the blogger is trying to say. The use of jargon language in the post title should be avoided.
The blogger should practice including a line at the end of his post: “If you have some queries and questions just leave a comment on this post”.
This will stimulate user’s interest towards the blog and the user will post apprehensions in his mind on the comments form or he may appreciate your efforts so it is really good to answer the comments left by the visitors on the blog.
Final Words
In addition, the blogger must investigate the possible causes of the high bounce rates. Polls should be conducted and contests should be held time to time so that more user’s visit the website again and again. Updating the blog with relevant and self created useful content will help reducing the bounce rate in a blog.
I hope that you have found the article nice and useful. Kindly use the comment form below to share your personal experiences of decreasing the bounce rate in your blog.
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Article Written By techfever
My Name is Usman Khan. Describing Myself I Would Say a Young Aspiring Pakistani Student who has Interest in technology and currently working as the Administrator of Rise Dream Blog.
techfever has written 1 superb article(s) on this blog
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{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
I do a lot of things to keep my readers entertained..like having video content and using internal linking to have them go to other related post on my blog.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Well, did you ever stop to think whether “bounce rate” is actually a good measure at all? Let me give you a simple example. My friend owns a e-shop (that I developed and maintain), so he comes to me one day (true story) and says: “Hey, let’s remove the prices from the category listings (where small images are) and leave them only on details page for each item…” Well, I’m employed by that guy, so OK
The week passes, we start to assess the results. The bounce rate(!) went down from ~50% to about 30%… Pageviews? Up about 30%… Orders? Down 20%… 
So, while the bounce rate went down – orders went down too.. Why? People are struggling – they have to click each darn page to see the price. They are forced to click (that’s why bounce rate went down), but they are so angry – they don’t want to buy anymore.
So I can’t really call “bounce rate” that good metric. Personally, it’s off all of my lists of “things to watch”.
My 2c
I agree. You have to make your content interesting and compelling and then design your blog to really highlight your content with thumbnails and featured posts.
Hi Usman
I have noticed when bloggers post their monthly stats that the bounce rates often seem high so this post is very timely.
As my blog becomes more well known I am getting people staying on my site for longer and reading other posts I have previously published. I find this encouraging. Also more people are commenting, asking questions and interacting too.
This comes as we build up trust and encourage one another with our blogging ventures.
Patricia Perth Australia
cool tips there Usman. As for me, I think having a related post plugin placed after the content helps reduce bounce rates, also, putting a strong call to action that invites readers to participate or share their thoughts through comments is also a great way to make them stay longer on that page.
Regards,
Jason
Great tips! It’s really a challenge to reduce bounce rate but it is possible. Everything you said here is true. As for me, I try to write something that my readers can relate to, I interact with them on the comments section. I always make sure that they know they can contact me whenever needed and that I’ll do my best to respond. I try to build relationships with my readers and not just a reader, blogger relationship.
Provides the fresh content that make people keep alive in your website as long as possible. Then you are done.
I like this post a lot. I spend a lot of time targeting high traffic SEO terms, and often I have to remind myself that it can be the terms bringing it less traffic that are the right ones to target. It’s no help bringing in tons of hits from a term that turns the majority of people away as soon as they get into your site. Targeted will always be the way to go.
All of the tips you’ve pointed out here really are helpful for new bloggers to reduce their blog’s bounce rate. What if there are some blogs that have a wide range of topics in their site? I guess that’s more challenging than blogs with only one niche, such as blogging niches. Thank you for sharing this!
analyzing you being a visitor and want a visitor actually wants is a good way to write a better post. Interacting with your post with the visitor in a friendly will make it more interesting..
I agree with Slava, bounce rate shouldn’t be an important factor to evaluate a website these days. A high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean the site’s content isn’t satisfying the visitor.
I mostly used to provide unique contents to my all of the readers. I think this is great way to reduce Bounce rate of any blog. Also, you have shared very helpful article.
Great Guest post. I have been getting a higher bounce rate on one my main blogs over the last few weeks and hadn’t been able to figure out why even now. I implemented a few new tricks including a poll and the plugin ‘popularity contest’ and seen my bounce rate drop considerably. I think someone of it has to do with changing things up and keeping your blog exciting.
Nice points, the site content should be worth reading, provide quality original content and you should improve loading speed, users usually get frustrated if a site takes forever to load.
Blogs tend to have high bounce rates as their posts are answer centric. People Google for question, your blog turns up, they have their answer, leave. For me, the #1 tip is listing related posts, to draw them into the site.
Providing relevant information to what visitora are searching will surely reduce bounce rate. This post is an eye-opener for struggling blogger like me.
Well, it’s already been mentioned, but I think it’s important enough to repeat: have a listing of “related posts” at the end of each post and/or sprinkle internal links throughout your articles, and you automatically hook people into reading more. I learned this, because it’s what I found I was doing on other people’s sites. If there were related posts listed at the bottom (or running down the sidebar), I was intrigued, and I clicked. One day, it dawned on me–why not do the same on my blog? Duh! LOL.
My best and working strategy is interlink with lots of related articles, and also add 2-3 links in between which are relevant to the article.
My main focus is to provide quality content that readers WANT to see. Also, the key to reducing bounce rates is to make sure the content goes with your blog or website. And, try to come up with interesting and more innovative topics, if you can.
Always try to engage the visitor to your site. Try to know the trend of commentator from there comments and which one your post is getting the rich comments. Try to focus on its relative topic.
The actual thing in this aspect is how long the user stay at your blog and how much you are successful in engaging visitors to your posts.
Reducing your bounce rate is pretty easy actually. Just have an interesting header, along with a video or two near some interesting images.
Works well for me at least.
/Nabil.
The main thing is quality design, quality contents and comments of the famous bloggers can increase visits on your blog and this will also affect the bounce rate of the site.
Bounce rate is not always a bad thing. If you run a website purely to make money from adsense with it you will most likely make more money if it has a high bounce rate since people exits the site clicking ads. (only in some cases though)
I am currently working on my bounce rate, it’s at 30% and I need to get it down to at least 20%. I have been looking at some wordpress plugins for internal linking and related posts but yet not found anyone that suits me.
Anyways, thanks for the article, it was verry informative. =)
//Alexander.
The mistakes and loopholes mentioned in the article are correctly pointed out. I’m not an analyst but I have a list of good blogs which delivers real information with solid content and I loyally visit those blogs and smartbloggerz is one of those blogs which are in my good books. What the blog can offer me is the first thing I look for and i.e, the content and there are a couple of shortcomings of a site which completely puts me off, say, like, a blog which consumes time to load, small texts or colorful ones almost same with the background, I don’t even look at those. I also don’t like blogs which looks more like a Press release site. I’m just a user and not a professional blogger but I love to read other people’s blogs and loves to interact with the commenting tribe/community.
Thanks for the article. Im a blogger by myself. Internal linking IS very good for me and my bounce rate.
Tysk recently posted..Mercedes SLS trimmad
Internal linking is a way to provide useful information to the visitors / customers.
Also, I make like more bounce rate when I internal link 10-20 pages. Crosslinking for the win!
Aside from creating good quality content the speed of the page load must also be consider because what’s the use of the content if the page load is slow.