While it sounds well that websites are able to rank and draw a huge amount of traffic, but sites often fail to remain on top because of bounce rate. Ranking a website is no easy task because Google considered a lot of things to keep a post or website on the top of the chain. One important Google ranking factor is the bounce rate.
Anyone who is not familiar with the term, bounce rate is the rate at which people bounce off or leave your website. If it takes your audience only a couple of seconds before hitting the back button, then Google bots consider the site to be not valuable enough to rank. Your site drops and your traffic falls. Here’s how you can fix this:
Don’t Write Contents Just to Rank
One of the biggest mistakes people running websites seem to make is having a mindset that prompts to produces content to rank in Google and not for providing value to the community that you serve. You can do everything right. Do great on-page and off-page SEO and still you’ll be unable to rank because you write clickbaity, stupid content with horrible content.
People stay on your site for only two seconds. Google knows what you are doing and deems you unworthy of being in the top five position of the search engine.
Consider Improving Readability
We have seen several websites with valuable content being ignored in Google. Why is that? Because of the bounce rate is high? But why is the bounce rate high in the first place if the content you are providing is of top-notch quality? The answer could be something as simple as readability.
The content may seem boring or even daunting because of the large paragraphs and lack of media like images and videos. The internet is a colorful place, and also very easily distracting. To retain attention, construct a colorful post that’s easy to read.
Bring Down Page Loading Speed
Another reason, your audience is bouncing off and not reading your value-driven content is because they can’t even open a page properly. Nothing kills a website faster than a heavy loading speed. A good loading speed is below 2 seconds which is just about the attention span of a person on the internet.
There are several ways to bring down the loading speed of a site. Check out some of the greatest DIY articles on the web. If need be, hire someone to do the job for you.
Be Careful With Pop-Ups
We’d recommend that you avoid it completely. But sometimes some websites are obliged to use popups, to attain retention and push the reader to read another article or to collect emails for marketing campaigns. At any rate, we recommend you use few popups and looks for alternative ways.
Consider Adding Recommended Posts
There are two great (but not the only) ways of recommending people to see related post; one is via popups on the side or at the end of the post. In the previous para, we recommended you avoid popups and this para we recommend you add recommendations at the end of the post. Don’t worry, they do attract attention.
Share with us what are you doing to bring down your bounce rate?
Hey Satish,
Great article. I think off-page factors also matters when it comes to Bounce Rate. High websites bounce rate is usually caused by poor targeting. If you share your message with an audience that isn’t generally into it, they might click on a link and visit the page due to curiosity. Even if they like the content, they probably won’t have the incentive to browse forward.