Reducing Bounce Rate

Reading the average guide to website success, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all the matters is the number of visitors you can get. This may be the case for a few businesses, if you’re running an online newspaper for instance, and it’s your hit rate that determines what people will pay for advertising. But for most, that’s just not how it works. If people are visiting your site and going away before they’ve bought anything or learned anything about you, that’s no use at all. And if they’re getting there via click through ads, it could be worse than useless. So what can you do about the bounce?

What Is The Bounce?

Sooner or later, everyone who visits your site will leave it again. When we talk about the bounce rate, we’re referring to those who leave it after seeing just one page, often within seconds of arrival. It might surprise you to learn that websites have an average bounce rate of 45%. That’s not evenly distributed. However, some persuade hardly anybody to stay while others succeed in reducing it to as little as 5% and get most visitors to stay for some time. What’s their secret?

Bounce Reduction Plugins

The simplest way to reduce your bounce rate is to use one of several plugins available for the purpose, such as Zero Bounce for WordPress. These work by redirecting visitors who click on the back button on their browsers, sending them to select other pages on your site instead. This works better than you might think, persuading some to stay and browse. It means you have two chances to grab them. Be careful though, as it can annoy some visitors to the point where they are permanently discouraged from engaging with you or your products.

Targeting The Right Customers

Many site owners try to draw in as many people as possible without paying attention to who they are. If they’re not part of the demographic at which your products are aimed, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to stick around or buy anything. Targeted advertising can do a great deal to reduce your bounce rate. If you can’t afford traditional market research options, a simple opt-in survey for people who buy your products can help.

The Importance Of Good Quality Content

Ultimately, if you’re going to keep people on your site, you need to make it worth their while. This means providing high quality and original content. Updating this regularly keeps visitors coming back and boosts your search engine rankings, so maintaining a blog is one of the best strategies you can use. Working with an agency like Purecontent.com means you can be confident of receiving well researched and well written content for it on a regular basis, in accordance with your specifications.

Internal Redirection

Finally, once you’ve persuaded people to visit your site and read something there, you’ll need to think about where to send them next. Embedding internal links in articles and including a sidebar or endnote with directions to similar content on your site is easy to do and very effective in getting people to stay longer.

With these simple techniques, you can significantly reduce your bounce rate and enjoy more meaningful website success.