| As if keeping your website fresh and unboring isn?t enough, now you also have to worry about its bounce rate. These days, it's not good enough that visitors actually drop by to view your site. To make sure your bounce rate stays good and low, your visitors have to stay awhile, browse and click on your links. So what do you need to do in order to decrease your website's bounce rate and keep your visitors happy?
What exactly is a bounce rate?
A website's bounce rate is determined by the number of visitors that visit your site and then leave without touching any of your links. They might have found your website through a search engine like Google, for example, viewed one of your pages and then left. The bounce rate is also referred to as the percentage exit.
What's a good bounce rate for a website?
There is no exact figure here but according to Google's Avinash Kaushik, a bounce rate below 20% is what you should go for although it can be extremely difficult to obtain. He further stated that website owners should take care that their bounce rates don?t go above 35% and should begin making serious repairs once the bounce rate reaches 50% and over.
Based on these recommendations, a good bounce rate must be between 20% to 30%.
How can the bounce rate of a website be decreased?
The effort it takes to stay on top of search engines should be the same effort used to decrease the bounce rate of your website. It all boils down to analysis, actually. To bring down your bounce rate figure, here are steps you can do:
Determine which pages have the highest bounce rates.
If your bounce rate is high, it doesn?t mean that you're always to blame. Some web pages are just naturally prone to higher bounce rates. This is because web pages contain different types of content that appeal to different types of visitors.
Some visitors, for example, may not really be part of your website's regular traffic. They may have arrived at your site to search for a topic or to obtain information for research and have no intention of sticking around. There are also some who might have followed a link from another site and have come to one of your pages to check it out.
Don?t consider a major rehash of your website if there are only a couple of web pages that prove to be problematic.
Write quality articles.
We know it's been said before but it's almost impossible not to overstate this tip. With quality articles, visitors to your site will stick around to read your write-up to the very end. If they like it, they'll want more of it and will be more likely to click to your links to check out what else your website has to offer.
Write serialized articles.
So you have a list of 101 good things to do on a summer's day. Don?t give this list in one whole page just yet. Give out the first 10 in a write-up today and then provide the next one tomorrow, the third the day after and so on. That way, anyone who comes across your first write-up will have to come back for the next one. You can effectively decrease the bounce rate of your website using this method.
Keep it short.
If you have a really great article, don?t post it in full text on a web page. Provide the title, a short description or the first paragraph of your write-up. Then use a link below that visitors can click to if they want to read the rest of the article. This trick will work even if your visitor just dropped by to do research on the particular topic your article covers.
Don?t forget your old posts.
To further decrease your website's bounce rate, write future articles that reference your previous ones. Include a link in the new write-up that visitors can click to. They will then have to view a different page in order to fully comprehend the ideas presented on your new article.
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