This is a guest post by Karenr Robinson.
5 Ways to Reduce the Bounce Rate on your Blog
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One of the main problems that a number of bloggers face is increasing bounce rate. Bounce rate denotes the percentage of visitors who come to a blog or website and steer away from the site after viewing just one page. Obviously, an increasing bounce rate is a hint that your homepage is unexciting or not good to draw the attention of visitors. If your blog’s average bounce rate is 70%, then 70% of the visitors to your website go away after just viewing the page they entered on. It can be your blog’s homepage or an internal page.
The bounce rate is the finest method to examine the activity of your blog’s visitors. If the visitors repeatedly go away from the blog after visiting only one page, you may have to change your strategies. So, what actions do people take after reading your post and how can you decrease your bounce rate?
Make Articles and Contents More Interesting to your Target Group
Your blog’s bounce rate is one of the things that determine the success of your blog. Most of the bloggers used to find it hard to maintaining a good bounce rate, but it’s not impossible to improve it if you make your posts including articles more interesting to them. The articles and contents that you post in you blog should be interesting and of top quality in order to induce the readers to move on to other pages of your blog. If visitors jump away to other blogs from your bog, then your articles and contents are likely not interesting to them.
Write Informative Articles
Visitors may bounce soon after landing on your blog post because your articles are not informative enough. People land on your article because they require information on a specific topic. If your post fails to offer them that, they will spring back right after landing on your blog. Therefore, if you wish to reduce bounce rate on your blog, concentrate on writing informative articles.
Some bloggers feel they have to post daily, regardless of the quality. Don’t just write an article for the sake of writing it and posting it on your blog, because that only increases the bounce rate. It is up to you to welcome visitors and attract them to the rest of your pages. Try to satisfy your visitors by writing articles with quality information.
Post Easy-To-Read Articles
Some of the bloggers consider that writing very long articles full of complicated words and ideas can draw the attention of visitors. It’s a false assumption since people will leave your blog if they find the articles hard to read. Thus, make sure to write articles that are short, easy to read, simple and concise.
You have to focus on presenting your ideas in a few paragraphs, with breaks in-between. Use simple, common words rather than complicated or confusing ones, to guarantee a good and easy user experience.
Split Your Articles into Parts
A lot of bloggers have a habit of writing long articles with no paragraphs. Others divide their articles into parts but focus on writing long paragraphs. If your visitors see a post that is, essentially, one long paragraph, they will leave or, at best, merely skim through it. A lot of visitors will lack the time to read your post carefully, so make short but to the point articles with different engaging paragraphs.
Write Unique Content
Uniqueness is of paramount importance. Posting unique articles and content can reduce the bounce rate. However, try also to concentrate on a single topic. Visitor interesting in, say, food, will probably not be interested in a political post, no matter how unique or interesting that might be. If, however, most of your posts revolve around food, they will be tempted to read more on that and will visit the rest of your posts.
Bonus Tip
If you notice a page or a category with a high bounce rate, try posting unique posts there and focus on ways you could make more information available. Also, make sure that your blog makes it easy to steer from one page to another through a clear and easy-to-use navigation.
Who is Karenr Robinson?
Karenr Robinson composes articles on various themes that she finds intriguing and posts them on blogs, web journals etc. She particularly enjoys distinctive scholastic articles. For the last few years, she has been keen on providing the best essay writing service, focusing on her client’s needs. She writes essays and articles on broad topics and has a wide experience on both scholarly and non-scholastic themes.
Terrific post, thank you. What I also do is at the end of every post I offer a couple of links to things the reader might be interested in if they enjoyed the specific post. For example if it’s an author tip, I’ll suggest to read another popular post on the subject. Or, if it’s a recipe, I’ll provide the link to the page that lists all the blogged recipes so they can choose another.
That’s a great idea. WordPress can do that automatically for you, but it hadn’t occurred to me to do it manually, too.
Sensible and I would have thought obvious advise. Nevertheless, thank you for sharing; always good to hear other people’s opinions and experiences.
Thank you. True, it’s fairly obvious once you’re somewhat experienced 🙂
Does wp give us bounce rate in our stats? I can’t see it anywhere, although I know from comparing visits to views that most readers read more than 1 page. I look forward to reading your post about it. Cheers Nick… always learning from your Blog! ?
As far as I can tell, the standard way is by connecting your blog to Google Analytics and reading it there. An easy proxy, though, is the readers/page ratio, as you point out 🙂
Yeah… Can’t connect a wp.com to Google analytics.
Oh, right! True…
Yeah… grrrrr!
Excellent post, Nicholas. Thanks for sharing. I’m bookmarking this.
Thank you so much, Janice 🙂
Nicholas. there is no ‘reblog’ on your blog.
There should be a black W button at the left of the screen, right over the blue crown icon. However, at the end of each post I also ask people who wish to reblog to go to my nicholasrossis.wordpress.com blog and reblog from that 🙂
Excellent advice as always Nicholas. Less boring and more user friendly are key. 🙂
As always, less boring and user-friendly save the day 😀
🙂
Lots of good points. Most of the hits on my self hosted blog are bots from Semelt or the like. I’ve no idea what they do. I seem to get way more visits on my WordPress.com blog.
Food for thought though, especially the title thing.
That’s why I re-activated my wordpress.com blog; people find out about me through the reader!
All great points, Nicholas. 😀 I think that one little mention about easy navigation is critical. I can’t tell you how many times I try to read more on a website and can’t figure out how to do it!
Ouch! Hopefully that’s never happened here 🙂
Yeah, right (rolling eyes). Nope. You are all set. 🙂
Interesting point! Not sure my blog’s bounce rate is a bad thing! The Welcome Page is a changing monthly featured sunrise or sunset, and a mini-bio of the blogger contributor. That first page also has a huge sunrise & sunset photo gallery! It gets consistent traffic with likes & comments on it & and other posts. The intent was to offer a peaceful blog visit right up front with only a few words to read! ? Christine (Elizabeth)
Your welcome page is a thing of beauty. I wouldn’t change a thing 🙂
Pretty sure I have a high one, but one issue is that I’m running out of topics to write about. A downside of blogging for so long is that the well can go dry. It’s even worse when the focus of the blog is writing and you have a long series. A ton of stuff can’t be mentioned due to spoilers or people have no interest since they aren’t at that point of the story.
That’s why I blog about everything book-related 🙂
My knowledge of books in general is usually pretty low. I have noticed that introducing a new type of post gets an influx for a month. Questions 3 and Teaser Tuesday started strong, but then faded back to the usually commenters. So ‘new’ definitely helps.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience!
You’re wel *goes to check what he wrote* come.
I suspect that I have a pretty high bounce rate, but I am not that sure about how to measure it. I can ascertain how many visitors view how many posts. On a good day, I might get up to four per visitor, though it is usually below three. On my other bog, I tend to have a 1:1 ratio, showing that each post has been read only once by each reader, and they have not looked at previous posts at all.
These are good general tips, but I for one do not want to ‘dumb down’ the blog by not using ‘complicated’ words, or breaking every post into bite-size chunks. I am sure that this works for many readers, but I will take the ‘bounce’ on the chin, and stick to my own style.
Thanks, Nicholas.
Best wishes, Pete.
If your visitors view 3-4 pages each, then you’re doing great!
As for dumbing it down, you’re right; you shouldn’t. The breaking it down into chunks has to do with ease-of-reading; formatting a post in a way that’s easy on the eye without actually changing anything content-wise, is a simple, yet effective, way of helping your visitors enjoy your blog even more. As for “big words,” there are blogs, however, that remind me of the famous Friends episode, where Joey goes crazy with a thesaurus 🙂
Indubitably, Nicholas!
Great article but like Hugh I’ve no idea how to measure bounce rate.
I just promised Hugh a post about that 🙂
Thats great thanks Nicholas. 🙂
A very interesting read, but how does one find out what their Blog’s bounce rate is? I have no idea what mine is or how to measure it.
Good point. I’ll schedule a post explaining that 🙂
Thanks, Nicholas. I appreciate it.
I’ve noticed that since I’ve changed theme my bounce rate has sank. I went from around 70% to around 20% in a metter of days. So, I suppose the way you graphically present your articles is also a factor in your readers’ engagement.
That is amazing!!! Thank you for sharing that – I’ll add it to the post 🙂