How to reduce bounce rate for your WordPress site

When we talk about web traffic analysis, we normally talk about Visitors, Pageview, Traffic sources then we talk about Conversion and how important it is to spend time and money on increasing it. Yet, we sometimes miss a metric called Bounce Rate.

Bounce rate or Exit rate is a metric in web analysis, showing the percentage of visitors entering your site and bouncing (or exiting) the site. Bounce rate can be interpreted and says a lot about your site. While other metrics like Visitors or Pageview say a lot about the quantity of traffic coming to your site, Bounce rate represents the quality of your site traffic. To illustrate, 100 people come to site A and site B at the same time while there are 30 people exit site B, there are 90 people exist your site A. Clearly that numbers tell something about the site quality that attracts more visitors to stay on site B than site A.

In addition, you can ask yourself that are you targeting the right traffic to your site? Targeting wrong visitors would lead to high bounce rate as well. Simply that your site is not what they are looking for, not because you have a bad one. In this case then you should reconsider your marketing tactics.

What is a good bounce rate? It’s not black and white to tell an exact number as this depends on how your site functions and serves which purposes. Literally, you would want to keep this number as low as possible. It is said that 70% is way too high for a site bounce rate and it would be good to keep it lower than 50% and 20% to 30% is awesome.

Does bounce rate affect your site SEO? Imagine thousands of visitors click on your site and 90% of them bounce out at the same time, apparently the site is not good enough. And despite of other SEO efforts, this site will be less likely considered for first-page search result from Google. So yes, it does have effect on your site SEO.

Keep your bounce rate as low as possible

Attracting customers is hard, yet making them stay is even harder. While there are many things needed to be done, here are several tactics to improve your site and keep visitors stay on your site.

1. Attract the right visitors

As mentioned above, wrong traffic coming to your site would be the reason that pushes up the bounce rate, as they find no interest and benefit from your site.  Wrong targeting not only costs you high bounce rate but in long term would affect your brand.

Firstly, define your core of business and your target visitors. Then think about the keywords, messages that you would use to reach out to them via which channels. Don’t try to get as much traffic as possible and attract just any random visitors. High traffic with high bounce rate doesn’t help.

Secondly, make sure you attract the right traffic with a good keyword and on-page SEO strategy. The days of stuffing keywords are all over. There is no more harm than drawing excited visitors to your site using irrelevant keywords then have them bouncing off your site in return.

2. Good layout design is a must

When visitors land on your site, the first impression they have on your site is important and determines whether they click the close X button in browser or continue surfing your site. A site with its clean and presentable layout will win visitors’ first impression and make them decide to stay a bit longer.

What makes good web layouts? A web layout involves different elements from graphics, grid to typography and has them well placed. I found this article about 7 key principles that make a web design looks good and I think you should check it out. Or this article shows how to build a good web layout.

Talking about web layout, there is another thing that you should take into consideration: responsive layout. People could visit your site using mobile and tablets and by that time you would be better get your site mobile ready.

3. Content: the king as always

Content is king and good content keeps audience. No argument here!

I’m no expert to tell you how to write your site content, but here are some factors that you could work on:

• Have your main message clearly displayed
• Use clear titles, headings and subheadings
• Make sure your content is well tailored for your right target visitors
• Keep errors and mistakes to a minimum
• Have call to action buttons clearly displayed
• Use along graphics and images

4. Good usability keeps audience

Let say you have attracted the right visitors, your website is well designed and tailored with useful content, you have earned your target visitors’ attention and made them stay for a minute. At this point, what make them stay longer highly depends on your site usability.

It’s important to make your visitors feel comfortable viewing your site, give them enjoyable experience with your site. This will keep them stay longer or keep coming back later to say. And this is the job of designing good website usability. You can easily find a lot of articles about how to build good website usability on the net today.

Here are some articles that you would find useful:

• 7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability
• Website usability checklist and guide
• 5 key principles of good website usability

5. Internal links: connect your every post

This works especially for blog and news websites. When a visitor finishes reading one of your blog post or an article, what’s next? If they are committed enough to move onto another one, good. If they don’t, let’s guide them. Embedding links in your content to relevant posts available on site is a choice. Also don’t forget to suggest related articles and blog post according to categories, tags, authors or create a sidebar with different sections like Most viewed, Recent, Popular, Editor’s picks and so on using widgets.

Given that you don’t want to distract readers too much with this way, infinite scroll technique can help. It automatically loads the next set of articles when readers reach the end of each post.

6. Site search: never leave viewers in a maze

What happens when users come to your site and couldn’t find their needed information in just several clicks? They will say their farewells and never come back. Sad but true. So be sure your search widget takes up a prominent position of your homepage real estate and make it sticky if necessary.

7. Lessen distraction

It is annoying to visit a site and get surrounded by ad banners, promotion bars and even popup messages. They distract visitors from the main content and make them just want to leave the site and never come back. So keep your site clean and minimize these distraction.

8. Speed up: now or never

Last but not least, site loading time is also an important factor. Trust me, not anyone is willing to wait more than 5 seconds for a blog to load, except for committed users and royal visitors. Speed up your page load or you can say goodbye to your potential users. If you are not sure how fast your site is loading, refer to some testing tools before further ado.

Conclusion

If you are serious about reducing your site bounce rate, then you should start working on the checklist now. This is a long-term strategy and don’t get frustrated if you don’t see the results right away. Please do share if you know some other tactics, we would love to hear about them.