We have all been through a rough patch while increasing search traffic to our website, improving our email subscribers list, and acquiring more clients, and it’s our bounce rate that has been affected. In simple words, website visitors who navigate to our homepage, bounce off before they explore more or even before we get a chance to convert them.
While you wish to increase other metrics measures, having a high bounce rate won’t do the trick.
But since we cannot control the bounce rates, have you considered what a good bounce rate is? A good bounce rate moves around 50% depending on the industry.
One way to boost your bounce rates can be having more landing pages. When you see your bounce rates skyrocketing on the landing pages, it’s a sign to improve your content strategy and needs a serious redesign. So what’s the problem with your pages? You must have seen the Time On Page metric on Google Analytics, and as the name suggests it’s the time a visitor spends on a particular web page.
Basically, the bounce rate is calculated after two major clicks, the link through which the visitor landed on the page, and an exit click. If there is no exit click and the visitor simply closes the tab (which happens most of the time), and even if the visitor is utterly satisfied with the page or blog, it will be considered as a bounce.
This is exactly what we will cover and find ways to reduce it.
11 WAYS TO IMPROVE BOUNCE RATE
Below are some proven ways that can reduce your bounce rate and improve conversion rates.
Make your content easy to read
Avoid large portions of text on the website, as it can scare away the users. Ensure that your content is readable and legible. Your blogs might have great content but without proper formatting, users will exit faster. Use bullet points, headings, subheadings, etc.
Add social media feeds
Use social media aggregator tools like the Taggbox widget to aggregate and display social media feeds like embed instagram on websites without any coding expertise. You can customize, and analyze the widget on the website.
Avoid pop-ups
70% of users say that irrelevant pop-ups are annoying. Avoid using pop-ups as they disrupt the users’ reading experience. Some marketers use aggressive content in their pop-ups, which immediately departs users.
Source: crazyask.com
Add compelling CTA
Once you build interest in the visitors, you might lose them with a weak call-to-action button. Make sure that the CTA is compelling enough to urge visitors to click on them. Make them land on relevant pages. For SaaS platforms, having a plain CTA with a free trial option can come in quite handy to reduce bounce rates and even build a loyal customer base.
Improve storytelling to engage visitors
Storytelling captivates users’ minds if you use it properly. Users usually scan a page looking for something that is unique like a subheading, a word, an image, or a term. Storytelling connects with the audience. Be clear in your content, appeal to the user’s dynamic minds, and make your story memorable.
Keep updated blogs
Keeping your blogs up-to-date yields better ROI. There is a thin line between engaging and proper content. Engaging or powerful content evokes a wow reaction, whereas the proper content gives them actionable tips to implement.
Use keywords with high-value traffic
Keywords are the key that makes or breaks your content marketing efforts. 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising and bulk revenue is from targeting expensive keywords. Not all keywords are equal, some bring valuable traffic some don’t.
Attract the right audience
High bounce rates usually happen when you target the wrong audience. If your content is not yielding the right customers, it’s time to improve. Use A/B testing and upgrade the content. Understand which audience you wish to target, compose content accordingly, and reach out.
Use attractive meta descriptions
Improving your meta descriptions will greatly improve click-through rates. The meta description is displayed as a snippet of your web page in the search engine to help users determine if it’s relevant to them. Use keywords in your meta description and make it attractive.
Create multiple landing pages
The more landing pages you have, the better. This will offer a richer experience and increase search click throughs. Creating more landing pages that are based on high-value keywords will increase engagement, offer a positive experience, and of course, reduce bounce rates.
Improve the web page load-time
People are impatient and do not wait for more than 3 seconds for a web page to load. Make sure your web pages use less load time. A slow website can destroy the experience and come down to high bounce rates. Optimize your plugins, remove any query string from static pages, etc to improve the performance of your web pages.
CONCLUSION
We’ve elaborated on multiple ways to reduce your bounce rates and eventually improve conversions. However, without high-quality content, reducing bounce rates can be tricky. In order to avoid that, map out a content strategy that will gradually increase the time users spend on your page reading the content.
To interact and engage with your audience, adding social media feeds can be a good solution. Keep at it, be consistent, and keep your content fresh and updated. The more you engage your audience, the better changes you have to increase your search traffic.
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Deepanshi Jain is a Digital Marketer. When she’s not tapping away at the keyboard you’ll find her traveling or chilling out with friends.