Bounce rate is simply a percentage of single page views. If a visitors is leaving your website then he is either not interested in your website or the content is not relevant to his needs. Bounce rate is not good from point of view of website performance so stop counting the number of new unique visitors in google analytic already. Following are some of the simple ways to reduce the bounce rate of your website and increase returning visitors.
Website design and loading speed
Website layout must be clean and appealing for users. Most of the visitors would stay on your website just because they found it attractive and appealing. Look and feel of the website does matters. Keep an easy navigation between web pages and an easy to understand category and sub category structure.
At the same time make sure that your website loads faster. If you put a lot of graphics or flash animations, your website will take a bit long to load. Don’t forget the scripts. Many client side scripts on a web page can slower down the load speed. Some of they might also give time out errors. So avoiding unnecessary scripts is always better.
Social Bookmarks
You probably know that the social bookmarking is one of the best ways to improve website traffic and page rank. But think about websites like Digg and Stumble upon that displays your website and if a user is not interested, he simply stumbles upon another website thus increasing your single page views.
You can however reduce this by always selecting relevant category for adding your links. But others who would bookmark your website might fail to select an appropriate category.
Never try those paid to surf or free traffic exchange websites. Those auto surf will highly increase your bounce rate and you will get getting a lot of unwanted hits to your website.
Keeping readers engaged
It is important to keep your readers engaged in an article. Use images and heading titles and make sure you provide relevant and interesting content.
Use WordPress plugins for related posts. This displays a list of posts that are related to the article. That can help readers navigate to related information reducing bounce rate. If you are not using WordPress then you might just have to create a custom script for showing related posts below an article.
Interacting with readers
Loyal readers who found your content useful or interesting would often leave a comment on it. Always reply to their comment to show that you care about their opinion. That would also send them an automated email that they have got a reply to their comment. That way you can always get returning visitors.
Tips and Resources
Provide extra resources to your readers in an article. Provide an ebook downloads that are relevant, free and that would help them. Explaining the information in steps is another measure to keep readers engaged. Make sure the tips are simple to understand and useful. Think from readers perspective that if he would actually follow your steps or not?
Subscriptions
Provide an subscription option for your readers. RSS or Comments, both would help you increase returning visitors. Often you can find wordpress plugins that can enhance subscriptions on comments section. Provide an incentives and write fresh content to attract your website subscribers.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the best way to reduce bounce rate and increase returning visitors of your website. Organic traffic is simply the traffic that comes from search engines. These are the visitors that are actually interested in your website content and would care to navigate and look for more information.
So better optimization of a website will help you reduce bounce rate and increase traffic.
Why should you care about reducing bounce rate?
It gives your website unwanted hits, thus consuming the bandwidth and wasting it.
Many CPM advertising networks would not accept websites with higher bounce rate because that would waste their advertisers number of impressions.
Wasted ROI (Returns on Investment). If you want to spread a genuine message or sell a product, then you wouldn’t want a higher rate of bounce rate.
Always use a website stastics or analytic application to track visitors to your website. And always try to reduce that percentage of bounce rate.
