If visitors come to your site and quickly leave, then you have a high bounce rate. Here’s why they might be leaving and how to reduce your bounce rate.
Does Your Site Have a High Bounce Rate?
One of the largest goals of any digital brand is to get people to visit their site and look at their content. However, even if you can effectively encourage people to visit your site, it won’t matter much if they don’t stick around long enough to take in your content.
A high bounce rate is what occurs when visitors click on a website and then quickly leave.
While all sites will have some of these, if that is most of your site’s traffic, this is a very problematic pattern. It indicates that people either cannot find what they are looking for on your site or had a poor experience due to its design or a host of other reasons. If you are dealing with this problem, here are five helpful steps to reduce your bounce rate.
How to Figure Out Your Bounce Rate
The data of your bounce rate comes from Google Analytics. It is fairly easy to connect Google Analytics to your jetpack site, but you can only access these features with a Premium or Professional plan. You can view your bounce rate on the Audience Overview page of your Analytics section. There are also other metrics which you can keep track of, which will help you gauge user experience and improve the website of your digital brand.
SEE ALSO: 10 Engagement Metrics You Should Be Tracking
The Steps to Reducing Your Bounce Rate with Jetpack
Jetpack offers a few helpful tools which you can use to reduce your bounce rate.
1. Turn On Related Posts on Individual Blog Posts
When people are directed to your site via Google search or by clicking a link on social media, the first thing they will see is your blog posts. Enabling Related Posts gives visitors a chance to read more posts about topics they are already interested in. Also, they can take a look at similar posts from your archives. Providing visitors value in the form of relevant information and helpful content can help turn them into customers.
Here are a few helpful tips to get the most out of Related Posts:
- Use a grid format to give Related Posts more room and increase their visibility
- Enabling post thumbnails displays related content in a more aesthetically pleasing way
- Customize the section title, which encourages visitors to click on and read your other posts
2. Get Visual
Long paragraphs can intimidate readers and look unappealing on a website. It is important to remember that over half of all website traffic worldwide is generated on mobile devices, as is illustrated by the graph below. The share of mobile web traffic is actually rising every year.
Many desktop and mobile users prefer to skim content and are unwilling to scroll through endless blocks of text. This is why concise paragraphs divided into subheadings and broken up with images tend to work best. Headings and subheadings allow readers to jump straight to the parts of your content that contain the information relevant to them. Also, images make your content easier to absorb and understand and add variety.
Images also give your site an important social media edge. In fact. an analysis of over 1 million articles found that articles with an image every 75-100 words receive double the social media shares of articles without images.
3. Include a Search Option
One thing that can contribute to a high bounce rate is visitors being unable to find the information they are looking for on your site. Fortunately, this is easy to solve. If you include a search box on your site, visitors can easily enter the exact thing they are looking for and find helpful results.
4. Make Sure Your Site Is Responsive
Responsive websites work across numerous screen types and sizes and are an absolute necessity to reduce your bounce rate. If your site is not formatted in a way that it can work across numerous devices, people will arrive at your page to see a jumbled mess and quickly move on. Responsive web design is key.
SEE ALSO: Navigating the Web Design Process
Responsive web design can not only help you reduce your bounce rate, but has numerous other benefits such as:
- Improving conversion rates
- Boosting search engine rankings
- Providing a high-quality user experience
Jetpack can make your site responsive in a number of ways. These include:
- Themes: Jetpack provides access to more than 100 sleek and professional themes. You can filter through these themes by category or functionality to find the ideal user-friendly theme for your site.
- Mobile Themes: These are key to ensuring your website looks and works beautifully on smaller mobile screens.
- Responsive Videos: Make sure to enable Responsive Videos before including video content on your site. This will let mobile users access them without problems. Videos and images that do not load can take a toll on your bounce rate.
5. Make Sure Your Content is Proofread
While images and videos are key parts of engaging content, do not forget about the content itself. This content is a reflection of your digital brand and can either help or harm your credibility.
A site that is full of typos and grammatical errors looks unprofessional and also distracts from the actual content. Many visitors will feel that they cannot trust or focus on content that is full of errors and leave your site. Jetpack offers a proofreading feature which can help. Tools like Grammarly can also be incredibly helpful.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate to Boost Conversions
While being able to draw customers to your site is important, it will not do your digital brand any good if visitors leave because they cannot use or find what they need on your site. A high bounce rate means that something out your site is turning off those who visit it. If you have a high bounce rate, be sure to take a look at your site and ask yourself these questions:
- How does my site look?
- How does my site look on mobile?
- Is it user-friendly?
- Do all of my images and videos load?
- Is my content relevant?
- Is my content proofread?
Ultimately, a professional, responsive, and user-friendly site that provides visitors with a positive experience is an incredible asset to any digital brand. When you reduce your bounce rate, you raise the chances of converting visitors into fans, followers, customers, and clients.
What is a deal breaker for you when you visit a website? Comment below…
