Tuesday, 14 January 2014
Effective Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate on Your Site
Website optimization is necessary if you are serious about increasing conversion and making money. When it comes to website optimization, bounce rate is one of the factors which everyone considers. Bounce rate is the reflection of the number of people who are actually interested in your site overall. Even a 10% reduction in the Bounce rate may do wonders for your CTR and Average site on Time.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors, who leave the site after visiting exactly one page.So, more the bounce rate, less is the profit you are making. There can be many factors which affect the bounce rate and most of those factors are different for different sites. But, there are some general factors, if you consider those factors and make changes accordingly, the bounce rate will be definitely decreased.
Effective Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate on Your Site :-
Internal Linking
Internal linking is considered good for SEO as well as good for reducing the bounce rate. Internal linking gives you an opportunity to keep visitors busy on your site, it provides visitors a channel to navigate through your site. You can do internal linking in a lot of ways, either you can simply mention your posts inside the body of the posts or you can use following methods.
1. Related Posts Widget
Related posts widget is actually important for reducing the bounce rate, as people reading the current post might be interested in reading on similar topic. So by using related posts widget, visitors can easily find the content which they might find useful.On WordPress, I suggest using n-relate plugin to show related posts.
2. Most Popular Posts Widget
Every blogger knows that there are only a few posts, that bring more than 75% of the total traffic to their site. So, it's good to place those posts in sidebar under most popular posts. You can use a plugin for this, or place them manually just by linking to those posts.Make sure that you don't use too many posts in the above sidebar widgets. Use only top 5-8 posts.
Website Loading Speed and Website Design
According to a study in 2009, 40% visitors will abandon a web page, if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if you have a slow website, indirectly you are losing money as well as visitors. Design and website loading speed are connected. You can have a good looking website as well as a fast website.
Also Read up on : How to Increase Google Page Speed Score
Using HTML5 and CSS3 makes your sites faster as well as good looking. If there is something that can be done using CSS instead of javascript, always use CSS. Also make sure, you are not using useless traffic stat plugins/scripts. Keep the HTTP requests least as possible.
You can also use these free CDN services to speed up your website.
I have made a list of sidebar/footer widgets which are must for every blog
- Subscribe/opt-in box
- Related posts
- Most popular posts
- Recent comments
- Categories/Labels
- Archives
- Social media links/widgets
External links
External links do not have as large impact as internal links. Still if you use too much external links in posts, make them open in a new tab, so that you don't lose the active visitor on site.
Final Words
Doing on-page and off-page SEO might help you to bring a lot of visitors on your website, but the minor tweaks and changes in websites makes visitors to stay on the site. So, whenever you get time to make changes to your website, make sure you follow the tips in this post.
So, did you follow all the Points that I have covered in this Post ? If Yes, then you must be getting lower Bounce rates compared to your non-optimized competitors.
Got any Questions ? Then Ask away in Comments, I am very fast with my replies :)
About The Author : Sachin Verma is an aspiring Photographer and Student. He takes great pride in his Website BitDoz and can be seen Posting about Technology and Reviews Gadgets there.
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Nice post. You have covered all the important points :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. :)
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