Anyone who has been blogging for a decent amount of time would know that while it’s relatively easy to bring in visitors by writing about the topics people search for, it is quite difficult to make them stay on your blog. However if you work hard to improve the end-user experience and make your blog visitor friendly, then you will notice that people would start getting hooked onto your site.
Here are some tips that have worked effectively for me in reducing the bounce rate by over 20 percent on my blogs, and can do the same for you if implemented properly:
1. Improve Your Design
As in many other aspects of life, the first impression is the last impression. So you should strive to create an engaging design that captures the attention of your readers and gives them a professional feel about your blog. The best advice would be to keep your design as neat & clean as possible, with a clear navigation that enables visitors to check out the other posts easily.
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2. Improve Your Loading Time
The loading time of your blog is another important factor that influences the bounce rate. If your blog has too many widgets & plugins, then it will naturally take some time to load, which may put off certain readers and they might leave your blog without reading any of your posts.
Try to keep the number of plugins to the minimum and deactivate any unnecessary plugins that you may have enabled. Also make sure that a caching plugin is installed to reduce the size of your pages and improve the loading time.
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3. Use Attention Grabbing Headlines
Most bloggers tend to use simple headlines that do not ring a bell in the heads of the readers. On the other hand, some bloggers use catchy phrases in their headlines which instantly grab the attention of readers and makes them instantly want to read the article.
Even if you notice this post, the headline could have been “How to Reduce the Bounce Rate of Your blog”, but I purposely used a much more catchy headline “7 Effective Tips to Reduce the Bounce Rate of Your Blog”. It sounds much better, doesn’t it? 😉
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4. Make Your Posts Error Free
If your readers encounter grammatical mistakes or misused phrases in your posts, they are likely to leave your blog without reading any other posts, so you should ensure that your each and every post should be error-free and grammatically correct. Also make it a point to read the posts before publishing them as you will be able to correct any typos or missing words in them.
5. Interlink Your Posts
Most of the readers are generally quite lazy, and tend not to browse any blog for too long, unless they are given an initiative to do so. What this means is that the onus is on you to make sure your readers want to read more of your content.
The best way to do this is by interlinking certain keywords in your post to other posts on your blog. You can either do this manually, or use a plugin called SeoSmartLinks which automatically creates internal links in your posts.
6. Reduce the Number of Ads
Though you need not remove ads entirely from your blog, you should try to place them in such a way that they do not lead to a bad reader experience. Also, pop-ups, pop-downs and other irritating ad types should never be used or the first time readers would most likely never come back to your blog ever again as these types of ads tend to be quite intrusive for readers.
7. Open External Links in New Window
This is a smart trick that most bloggers forget to implement. If you have a habit of linking to other websites/blogs in your posts, you should add target=”_blank” to make the links open in a new window so that the readers stay on the post they are reading on your blog.
If you implement all of the above tips, then you will certainly notice a vast improvement in your blog’s bounce rate.
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About Harshit Singhal
Great Tips Harshit, Bounce Rate is one thing every blogger should take care of after these Google Animal tremors
It’s a very good post Harshit. I think adding some videos to posts and interlinking posts can help us to reduce bounce rate..
Great read, I always make sure every link to an outside source opens in a new tab. Makes getting back to my page less complicated for them, because they just have to go back to the tab 🙂
Also one more point to be considered is Improving the post quality. If the posts are very outstanding in terms of quality the readers would like to read more from the blog. This will lower your bounce rate & also will increase the average time spent on site.
nice tips indeed. I feel writing to-the-point content also help in reducing the bounce rate. But m still confused whether long or short posts do good to reduce bounce rate.
Thanks for commenting Shiwangi. Personally I feel 500-600 word articles tend to work the best.
For this list, most of the bloggers lack is improving the loading time, according to surveys, if a website take more tan 5 minutes to load, visitors will hit back button and tend other sources. So loading time is ultimately important.
And other one thing is, everyone using handheld devices these days, if we optimize our site for handheld users, means when we optimize our website for mobile users by installing mobile version, we can minimize the bounce rate.
Hi Harshit, nice to see another fantastic guest post of yours on iTechCode. High bounce rate is one of the common problems which is being faced by many bloggers, including me. But, I have now started getting rid of this issue, I improved my site’s loading time and done an enough amount of interlinking between relevant articles. Those steps have finally started showing me the positive outcomes. Anyways, thanks for sharing this post.
Great tips. 1st and 5th tip have really worked for me. I brought down my blog’s bounce rate by 10% by making changes in design and by interlinking my posts.
i must say its a great and really informative post, making visitors stay on your site is really a tough job and almost everyone is tired of trying to keep them stuck at something or the other on their blogs/websites. With these tips presented here i am sure one will start to get lower bounce rates if implemented correctly.
Regards
Ravi Shankar
One of the smart tips to to decrease bounce rate is this: use related posts under every post. You’ll certainly increase more pv’s. And if possible, don’t clutter the sidebar and fill it with your popular posts.
Very useful post Harshit, from personal experience I can say that interlinking post works very good at lowering bounce rate. As people tend to click through to the next page and so on.
thanks for sharing
Hi Harshit,
very good tips, especially the last one about opening external link in new tabs. I think this is very important because if a user opens an interesting link in the same window he may simply not return to your page.
According to me if the post has some inter links which are relevant using some good anchor text then this gives a positive impact in blogs bouncing rate.
I read the article and found the above mentioned point interesting however other points were also interesting but as I’m giving focus to this literally 😀
I’ve had luck with interlinks, but lately I’ve been looking to knock my bounce rate down further and you’ve given me some good tips! Thanks!
Ya I can get some great info for my blogging.I am not very new but when i do blogging sometime it get some bounces so i feel it is not good for me so i want to reduce it so i can see here is very great info to reduce this problem also.I think now i can do it very well and this page getting saved.
Interlinking blog posts is one of the most effective ways to reduce a blog’s bounce rate. It works for me every time 🙂 The more I interlink, the lesser is the bounce rate for that post.
Thanks Harshit for providing us these tips. I hope these tips would be helpful for us. Reducing Bounce Rate is all what the search engine optimizers always think of. This definitely creates a good effect on the website. I like the “second” and “third” point that you have mentioned. Fast loading sites definitely helps the visitors to get through the website within a moment and not to divert back from the site. I really feel this is important. Secondly, I also think that a good headline definitely attracts a lot of customers. So, this is also very important. Thank you once again for the important update!!
Thanks, I wonder if I should decrease the number of ads on my blog? I’m not sure why that would make a difference, Any thoughts on this?
very nice tips. Blog design plays an important role whether it is related to SEO or else. It must be good and easy to navigate.
Thank you for the above given tips, as my blog is a Graphic design blog i need to showcase a lot of images so its taking time to load, can you suggest me any tips for that.
These are nice tips Harshit. I would like to add some more:
* The site needs to look good in all browsers. There is a chance of people leaving the site if the design appears cluttered in browser. So, we need to test our site in all browsers. Browsershots.org can help to do this.
* Removing all the auto playing audio tracks from the site, as this may irritate the reader and he/she may end up clicking the back button of his/her browser.
* Stop using Welcome banners which ask for subscription or facebook likes.
* Add a search bar to 404 pages and Home page. 🙂
These are some really great tips. I think the first 2 tips are very important and I’m glad you put them at the top. If a website is taking to long to load I will just close the tab and never visit it again. I’m sure most people are the same way.
Interlinking is the best way to reduce traffic because when Google crawler start crawling your content then they follow all the links within the post but if you put more outgoing links there then crawler will follow those links and get out from your site.
Same with readers, they also follow the internal links and will be engaged on your site for longer.
So More interlinks on relevant anchor text works the best and ofcourse lesser outgoing links should be there.
Despite many people think that Content is king, but I believe that the design plays a more important role. If you can amaze visitors with your design, they won’t even read your articles. And of course, they don’t care how good it is, they will leave immediately.
Hey the above mentioned points does make changes to the bounce rate but to some extent 🙁 I have tried them all from using new tab to inter link and attractive title but it’s help to some extend only. but the mentioned points are really good and should follow to reduce the bounce rate of the blog.
Thanks for sharing this article.
Hi Harshit,
thanks for your tips. I like especially interlinking posts. I can add only one more tip – below each post you can show also links to related posts.
Chris
Hi Harshit,
Great post indeed.I must say if one will follow these steps they will never have to worry about the bouce rates.
Also site should be simple but informative.Using too much flash will make a site look like a fish market when placed with ads.
Rightly pointed out.
Its not easy to get traffic to your blog in the first place. ( Ask me- I am a new blogger and I know how difficult it is to start attracting visitors).
No blogger in his right senses would want to lose a reader who did manage to get there.
Yea, ads can be distracting and annoying for the readers but then they are a blogger’s bread and butter.
A necessary evil, to use the cliche`.
Well written article. Thanks.
I agree with you Ambika, Ads are a blogger’s bread and butter, thus one cannot remove it but yeah placement matters, place it such that the reader doesn’t face any difficulty in reading the content.