Your Blog or Website Bounce Rate How To Fix It

You will want to know if your content is engaging the visitor and if so what they find interesting and most valuable from your site.

Google Analytics allows you to place some code in the form of html script on your site pages that will record the data of each visitor to your site.

Bounce rate is where a visitor arrives at your site and then immediately leaves by either clicking the back button or closing the window.

A bounced visitor is one who was looking for something in particular but did not find it when they came to your webpage.

A bounced visitor is a lost visitor and you have to consider several options to optimise each visitor to your site, whether it is to engage the visitor to visit other pages of your site or to get them to take a call to action you have placed, such as a sale or signing up for your newsletter.

A bounced visitor is often referred to as leaving money on the table, you really got nothing from them, when all you wanted was for them to visit your site and do something.

So why do visitors leave straight away and increase the percentage of your bounce rate?

Why Do Visitors Bounce

OK. Let’s assume that we are the bounce visitor. That’s my new term for this hubpage. Ask yourself why did you bounce? The answer maybe that you arrived at a site that had awful colours, the site was slow to load, the site had too many or not enough photos, it was full of ads or at worst, it looked like a novel from War and Peace that you simply did not want to read.

Bounce visitors leave your site on first impressions. Simple. First impressions. So how do you find out what’s wrong, why did they leave?

The best way is to have your partner, parents, friends, schoolmates, anyone really and the best are those who will be most critical of you, to look at your site and you ask them, no you demand from them, straight away, their first impression.

You will get either the “look” or the gasp or hopefully the confirmation you were looking for that the site is good. Now lets leave the last one out. If you wanted an answer that said the site was good, then it won’t help your bounce rate.

You want someone to say, the colour is too harsh, there are too many ads or the content is dribble, I hate it. You want the very worst comment from the persons first impression on your site. Gordon Ramsay springs to mind at this point, he’d tell you and will leave you on no uncertain terms why you have a high bounce rate.

What Do We Do Now?

You have had your site evaluated and found from that person what they first thought was wrong and turned them off. If its the colour then you can fix it by changing the colours around until the site is more suitable.

If its the content, then you can re-write it and make it more interesting or shorter and to the point.

If its because you have too many advertisements on your page, then reduce them or find a better place on the page for them.

It is by going through this process that you can get the aesthetics, the looking good part, of your page right to lessen the intitial reaction of your visitor to leave straight away.

Is that all you can do or is the more. Well of course there is. You know me by now, I always have a few tricks.

A Couple Of Secret Tricks

I love that heading. Sounds like I have invented something but in reality I have not invented anything at all, its just human nature and common sense that is the basis of these not so secret tricks.

To explain – On the world wide web we click, we click sites, the back button, sign up forms, Paypal buttons to make a purchase, advertisements and other links.

We go to a page and read the article or the blog post. When we finish that – is there anything else we can click on? No. Nine times out of ten there is nothing left for us but the bottom of the page or a comment bar.

Our reaction is straight to that little X in the top right hand corner or the back button.

The trick is to put a link there. Such as, “To read more visit more information” text link. Give your visitor something to click at the bottom of your post or page that directs them to a second page on your site. If they are interested they will click on the link for more information.

Thats what we want. Have the visitor click something after they have read the page or post so we record a unique visitor with zero bounce rate. This is the purpose of our site, to attract and command the attention of our visitors.

Not all visitors like to comment on a blog post, so place a link at the end of the post article. This way you are deep linking, internal linking your pages which is good for search engine optimisation.

Failing all that, place an advertisement there or a newsletter sign up form or email a friend capsule. If where going to lose the visitor then lets at least try to get them to take action.

Whether its an Adsense advertisement or other providers advertisement, we may just convert a visitor to a call to action. After all, thats one of the reasons we have our sites.

What we do not want is to have a subscribe to our RSS feed at the end of our post as visitors may subscribe and as they do leave the site creating a bounce visitor statistic. Place the rss subscription elsewhere on the page as if someone wants to subscribe they will. Thats why Blogger has the rss button at the top.

Having a related posts navigation button at the bottom of the page will always encourage the visitor to click for more information.

Basically, if you want to stop your visitors recording a bounce rate, then give them somewhere to go at the end of your pages. Entice them to read more and visit another page of your site.

You will probably find that there is nothing wrong with your site in the first place.

The visitor came, got what they want and left. Why not tempt them to keep clicking at the end.