How to decrease your blog’s bounce rate?

One of the major aspects in the success of a blog is its “bounce rate”. A blog with a low bounce rate is expected to get more sales because of the users interaction with the content for a extended time period.

Today we will talk about that how we can improve our blog’s bounce rate to ensure our user engagement with us in both present and future.

Before going right into the post we will first discuss some major points of blogging and bounce rate.

First I will like to tell you that what bounce rate really is.

What is Bounce Rate?

We all have heard about this term many times but not many of us really know that what bounce rate really is. According to Google Analytics “bounce rate” is the percentage of single page sessions on your website.

Meaning that how much time a user spends on a single page of your blog.

Some other factors

Now that we know that what bounce rate really is, we need to talk further about it. We will first examine our selves as a user or reader.

We will examine that when we read a page and why we leave a page?

To make it more simple I will divide this line of phrase into some simple questions.

• Why we start reading a page?
• Why we leave a page?
• Why we re-visit a website?
• Why we don’t re-visit a website?

If we could ask our selves, I am pretty sure that 50% of the work will be done automatically.

For question no. 1, obviously we start reading a page when we find something interesting on it. For Example an attracting title or an attracting image.

As far as question no.2 is concerned, we leave a page when we find it not useful.

We re-visit a website when we find the useful resource on it in the past.

We never re-visit a website which we believe that it will not be able to provide us the useful resource we want.

So concluding all the debate in a few phrases, I will like to say that we love useful resources and we hate spam content.

As simple as that!

But the rule applies on others too. This is the reality which every blogger should admit before starting a blog. I mean if you don’t visit spammy websites then others will also not like to do the same.

This is the common behaviour of a decent man, He don’t like to talk rubbish neither we want to listen.

He must read other blogs with advertence to gather quality resources from the content. And finally when he is writing a post on his blog he must make sure that he is writing content which has quality, a good accent and some relevant resources which are really helpful for users.

A few days ago I made a small research. I wrote two articles which were more or less about same topic(about alexa ranking) but I made a few differences in both articles.

Actually the biggest difference was the writing technique. In the very first post I made a few flaws, I did some grammar mistakes intentionally but I left some very useful resources in it.

And the results were expected, For that particular article the bounce rate increased and jump up to 72.69% which was not a good result indeed.

As far as the second article is concerned I made it the best in terms of writing. I use plain English and accent was very friendly too. However, the resource was not very useful.

But still I managed to block the bounce rate below 69.58% threshold which was indeed a pleasing result.

So did you got my point? Your way of writing is one of the major factors which will leave huge impacts on your blog’s bounce rate.

So we will now start talking about decreasing bounce rate deliberately.

5 major factors to decrease bounce rate of your website

One of the most common things we have heard about is quality content. All of those old SEO and Blogging mentors have teach us to write quality content and then leave it all on luck and search engines which is a big lie indeed.

You can read my blog post about increasing your blog traffic by clicking here

But there is a huge difference between quality content and attracting content which I will like to explain.

Lets assume that we have two blog posts, One is about making money and one is about spending it and titles for them are:

• How to earn 50,000 dollars online in 7 days
• How to live in Dubai for 50 days with just 500 bugs.

So which one is more attracting? Definitely, the first one is more attracting but it doesn’t seem that the content will have any quality in it since the claim seems to be very hypothetical. We all know that a newbie cannot earn 50,000 dollars online in just 7 days.

But still it will attract a ton of visitors because people like to know the ways of earning, after all we all need money in our pocket.

But the problem with this piece of content will be the bounce rate. People may read it once but then they will leave it because normally these sort of content ask people to first invest a few dollars and then they claim to give good results. Well, everyone is smart enough to dodge such betrayers. Eventually they will leave the page with a few words of disgrace.

Now lets come to the second post title. We all know that people have their own ideas to spend money but imagine if a man from U.K wants to visit Dubai, he has a small budget and he needs some travelling guidance then what will he search on Google for some guidance? Perhaps he will search “cheap budget hotels in Dubai” or “cheap budget travelling packages for Dubai”, right?

So if he finds our second post on search engine I really believe that he will love to visit it.

And if our second piece of content has quality he may keep reading it which will do a great job to improve our blog’s bounce rate.

See? The first post attracted more visitors but didn’t did enough to keep them engaged with itself and the second post attracted lesser amount of traffic but people loved it therefore they stayed on the page.

Since our topic is to improve bounce rate of your website we will focus on the second post. If you will inspect both titles you will notice that titles are the biggest factor in terms of attracting visitors. So its on you that whether you focus on getting visitors or you rely on keeping them engaged with your blog.

A combination of both will make your blog a pro blog.

Ok, so now I have made my points very clear. So now lets start the post descriptively.

Using of Headings

Generally we use headings in our every post. However, by using them smartly we can engage our readers more wisely with our content. It will be a great idea to categorize our content by separating them into different labels which we call headings.

This will help your readers to identify the topic of the specific paragraphs  your article contains.

Lets say you write an article about health which consists on 4 different paragraphs.

In the first paragraph you introduced the topic of your content and in second paragraph you wrote about fitness, in third para you highlighted some facts about unhygienic food and in the last paragraph you write about a good healthy diet but you didn’t gave these paragraphs any headings.

Now a user came across to your page who is his interested to learn about a healthy diet. He read the first lines of the first 3 paras but he got bored because he wasn’t able to find any useful resource from your content therefore he leaves your page because he suspect to get disappointment from the paragraph too.

Did you get it?

I hope that this imaginary case study was pretty useful for you to understand the importance of headings. Imagine if you would have had give a few relevant headings to your paragraphs then the scenario would be very different.

Now lets assume that you give relevant headings to all of your paragraphs and the same user visits your blog post. Now he will directly move over to your fourth article because he knows that what it is about because of the heading you have just give it.

Using of Images

Yesterday, I visited 15 different blogs and read several articles there. While I was reading all these articles I noted one thing and that was that I spent more time on those articles who had images.

Because I was very attracted towards these images.

Actually sometime images say more than words. Yesterday’s lesson was a very very big learning for me that is why I have decided to use images in my articles from now onwards.

However, in terms of search engine optimization using these images isn’t a healthy way to get higher ranking on SERPs because Google spiders cannot read images therefore they will not be able to specify your article’s topic thus text retains its importance.

Using of Infographics

Infographics are those images where you explain something to your users by using some images. This article from Quicksprout will be a great example of what I am talking about :

How to decrease your bounce rate

Using of plugins

Frankly speaking, I don’t like these sort of plugins to reduce bounce rate of a blog. Its kind of a hack but since many of highly reputed bloggers have recommended these sort of plugins why can’t I?

You can use many plugins such as Zero Bounce Rate, just search on Google and you will find a ton of plugins of the same sort.

However, these plugins are premium and you may only use them when you feel it very necessary.

You may also like to read

• How to write quality content