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If you’re struggling to retain website visitors, generate leads, and increase conversion, have you checked your website conversion and readers’ engagement rate?

Maybe your readers are leaving from the entry page. If this is so, you’ll have to learn how to reduce the high bounce rate on your blog and improve the reader’s reading time.

I will share the top 11 ways to reduce the high bounce rate on your website and increase conversion.

Depending on your website’s business goals, the high bounce rate on your blog does not necessarily mean users are not interacting or engaging with your content.

When users visit through the search engine or from other web pages and find what he is looking for, they might not need to check on other pages.

So, before you decide to reduce the high bounce rate on your blog, it’s important to know what type of content you offer visitors to your site.

What is Bounce Rate in Digital Marketing?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the website after viewing only one page (entry page) on the domain.

These users do not view an additional web page on the website.

Generally, this user activity is unsuitable for business, getting leads, or increasing conversion on a website.

It is a general belief in the digital marketing world that when a user visits a website and navigates away from the entry page to another external domain, it signals that your content does not meet the user’s expectations.

How to Reduce High Bounce Rate

Now that you’ve understood what bounce rate is, let’s move on to how to reduce the high bounce rate on your blog. If you follow these strategies, you will see improved onsite engagements, more reading time, page views, and conversions.

Just as Google uses links to find web pages on the internet, visitors need links on your website to discover relevant content that matters to them.

Interlinking your articles helps connect relevant topics and provides users with additional reading resources.

Also, it helps provide relevant backlinks to important pages on your website, which influences its position in organic search engine ranking.

Let’s assume you’ve written a post on why starting a blog is necessary for business owners. And another post on how to start a blog on WordPress.

Interlinking these two posts together will help readers achieve a lot.

Business owners who want to know the benefits of having an online presence will probably want to know how to access their blogs online.

By interlinking relevant content topics, you’re helping readers discover more valuable information on your website, increase time spent, reduce bounce rate, and provide a better user experience for your blog.

2. Create valuable content

Every other known recommendation on reducing the high bounce rate on your blog will be useless if your blog contains nothing but junk information.

People only read blogs that add more value to their life. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your blog design looks.

If users feel you’re not adding value to better their experiences. They’re likely to leave your site without clicking any further.

If you want your site visitors to stay longer and always come back to visit, give them a reason to do so. Provide value in whatever you do, or you will always leave without saying goodbye.

3. Target the Right Traffic

SinceNottraffic tactics or channels are worth your time or investment. This depends on your type of website topic, written language, and business (products and services).

If your website content is written in English, what’s the point of marketing your content to Chinese?

That could be a waste of time and resources.

If you get traffic from the Asia continent to your website, it will probably be %100 bounce.

Likewise, if what you discuss on your blog is all about blogging, SEO, and content marketing, driving traffic from places like Instagram might not help.

But if your website topics, products, and services are in the entertainment, fashion, gossip, breaking news section, etc., marketing on Instagram is a perfect recommendation.

Not targeting the right audience for your content is like marketing a TV to a blind man.

You’re likely not going to make any sales.

Make sure to market your content to the right audience. So you can have a good return on investment and a better conversion rate.

Here is a detailed post that walks you through the process of driving quality and engaged website traffic.

4. Target Longtail Keywords

long tail keywords graphs

From an SEO perspective, another primary reason you might have a high bounce rate is not targeting longtail keywords within your content.

For instance, you wrote an article with your focus keyword as “blog.” In reality, you’re not targeting anyone with such a keyword.

If you rank high for such keywords and appear on page one of SERP, your article will be everywhere, just as your visitors will bounce off your site.

Are you targeting people who want to know about “what is a blog”? Or people who want to learn more about “how to start their blog”?

Another set of people is looking for ways to improve their blog quality and get more out of it.

So you see, all these users have the word “blog” in their search terms but with more description to define what they want to know about the keyword “blog.”

So, when writing a blog post next, do more about your keyword research and think about who your target audience is.

If you can answer the question correctly, your article will find its way into the hands of those who need it.

5. Avoid Too Many Ads On Your Blog

Too many ads cause distraction and show that you are careless about giving value to visitors but making money.

You send a negative signal to users when your blog looks like Adsense farms to visitors and has no meaningful content.

This often annoys users and prompts them to leave as quickly as possible without clicking further.

The best practice for blog ad placement is the sidebars and one or two at the header, depending on your theme layout.

Allow users to see good reasons why they need to check your content.

6. Display Related Post

This is a great way to display more of your content relevant to the current one in reading.

An excellent way to do this is to install the WordPress-related post plugin.

I also have one at the end of this content. You can see it right below the conclusion part.

7. Have a Clear, Visible Tagline

It takes one second for internet users to decide whether to stay on a blog. Within this second, your visitors should be able to tell what your blog topic is all about.

If users have to guess around your blog too long before knowing what you blog about, then kiss them goodbye.

Many blogs on the net offer the same services or products as yours. Don’t waste people’s time by not quickly telling them what you offer.

The best way to quickly tell anyone who visits your blog what you blog about is by crafting a clear, visible blog tagline.

A blog description message that, in two or three words, explains what your blog topics are all about.

This blog tagline reads, “Blogging tips to help you make money online.” Quickly, you know what type of information to expect from this blog.

8. Avoid Pop up

pop up email ad

Avoid pop-ups of any kind if visitors want to stick around your blog for a while.

This pop-up does more harm than good.

Imagine this scenario: I visit your blog from another web page, and the first thing you throw in my face is an email subscription form.

Why should I give out my email address when I don’t know you? I don’t see the value of what you offer.

I don’t even know if what you have is what I want.

You seem to be a spammer. Someone is very interested in the privacy of others and sends them unsolicited emails.

Offer valuable services or gifts in exchange, and people will willingly give you their email contact addresses.

9. Avoid Slow Loading Page

Every day worldwide, technology is improving, and people want the best.

Nothing is annoying, like waiting 10 to 20 seconds for a single web page to load.

Online users are one of the most impatient people. The longer you make them wait to access your website pages, the more chances you will lose them.

One of the easiest ways to improve the speed of your website pages is to install the WP Rocket cache plugin.

This plugin is a one-click solution to improve the loading speed of your WordPress blog.

You can read more about the WP Rocket cache plugin on this page.

WP Rocket is a powerful WordPress caching plugin and Image optimization to achieve faster loading time.

Moving to a better hosting service provider might be a good thing to consider, too, as the performance of your web server plays a crucial role in your website page speed and up-time.

10. Keep It Simple And Short

This applies to every element of your blog, especially your blog content.

Don’t use three words where one will do, and most importantly, avoid creating a long wall of text.

Structure your content to attract the reader’s eyes. This moves them to want to read more. This also goes to every other section of your blog; keep it clean and free from clutter.

Let your content exceed the 17-word count across the page and a maximum of 4 lines per paragraph.

It makes your content look tidy and inviting.

11. Write a Magnetic Headline

headline - scrabble words of headline

Don’t get this twisted.

Unless you’re new here, I mean to internet marketing. You and I know only one significant element increases the open rate of any sales copy.

That’s just the headline.

Think about it this way. Apart from the regular post updates on your blog, which allow for a snippet…

You only have your article’s headline in other places where you promote content on your blog through sidebars or footers.

Either you display popular posts. Related post. Recent post. Most commented posts, etc. The article headline entices the reader to check the body of the article.

So, crafting a magnetic headline is one of the keys to a successful content marketing campaign.

Your article’s headline can increase users’ time spent on the blog by approximately 50%.

The more enticing content headline you have on the blog, the more articles readers will love to read. This will undoubtedly lead to more time spent on the blog and drastically reduce your overall bounce rate.

Conclusion…

In this article, I have shown you a few tips you can try out today to reduce the high bounce rate on your blog.

But one thing you have to keep in mind is this…

All things being equal, the quality and value of your content play a more significant role in retaining and acquiring readers on your blog.

If your content sucks, the user doesn’t find it useful for the intended purpose; every other tip on this page will fail miserably to yield the required result.

How have you been working to reduce high bounce rate on your blog?

I’ll be glad to read about your experience in the comment box.

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32 Comments

  1. An amazing post on the much-faced problem by the new blog users. The way you’ve represented your post and provided these detailed and helpful tips that will surely work for all of the people out there facing the same problem. Great work keep it up.

  2. Nice Work! I’ve read most of your articles and I love to read them at your site as you got the best stuff, I have never seen such articles Like how to earn money without investment, online earning . You always post amazing things like that.

    1. Thanks, Matloob,

      Probably in subsequent publications, I might discuss something related to that. Thanks for your time here, and glad you find them resourceful.

      Thanks.

  3. Hello Adeshokan,

    Brilliant points. I really hate pop-ups as they are very annoying. you are right Plastering your blog with plenty of ads does not make any sense. Your audience becomes very smart and easily understand which is an ad or not hence they will leave your site and never come back. The first impression is the last impression. If you haven’t convinced your audience at first visit then it might increase your bounce rate. Thanks for sharing these helpful tips.

    Regards,
    Vishwajeet Kumar

    1. Hi Kumar,

      Thanks for the visit, and sorry for the late reply.

      Pop pos of any kind do more harm than the good. If it doesn’t give maximum user experience, just don’t use it.

      Thanks for your time here. I appreciate your visit.

  4. Hey Shamsudeen,

    Lots of valuable tips here. Ultimately it comes down to providing as great of a visitor experience possible, and then giving a reason to continue browsing the site. You provide a lot of great tips for those two things as well.

    When I was first starting out years ago, I did have some issues with bounce rate – a lot of it was due to the fact that I was a much more inexperienced writer than I am today (and it was obvious.) I was also working with content topics that were particularly prone to high bounce rates – so markets and topics as a whole are more ‘browseable’ than others, and enticing someone to read more articles is easier.

    The tips here however can be utilized for almost every site though!

    1. Hi James,

      Good to have you here sharing your experience with us.

      You’re right on that. Market and some niche topics are prone to high bounce rate. This is something marketers need to understand about users and industry.

      Thanks, James, nice having you here.

  5. 6 ways to improve high bounce rate!
    1. Improve Your Content’s Readability
    2. Avoid Popups – Don’t Disrupt the UX
    3. Create a Compelling Call-to-Action
    4. Improve Your Brand Storytelling
    5. Keep Your Blog Fresh With the Right Content
    6. Target Keywords With High-Value Traffic

  6. Thanks for explaining the concept of bounce rate, The Heat map is perfect to track and improve bounce rate.

  7. Hi Shamsudee, Nice blog. Initially i used have too many pop up related to newsletter and load time for my blog was also very slow. There was a increase in the bounce rate of my blog. however over a period of time i realized that bounce rate was not at all coming down. So i hosted my blow on AWS and remove all the unnecessary popups and i was able to drastically reduce the bounce rate of my blog.

    1. Hi Sajan,

      Good to read about your experience in reducing your bounce rate. Yes, the quality of hosting service could also affect page speed which is one of the reasons to have a high bounce rate.

      Thanks for your time here.

  8. Could you more elaborate on: #4. Target Longtail Keywords.

    thank you 🙂

  9. author comments Henry Obilor says:

    Bounce rate is one metric that should be looked at seriously.
    You strive to get your bounce to a minimum
    bounce 40 or less is okay.. anything higher than means you need to go optimize.

  10. author comments smart home says:

    High Bounce Rate of a web site is not good. It must be reduce .This blog provide the most useful technique for reduce bounce rate.

  11. author comments My Jio Seo says:

    Hi, Shamsudeen Adeshokan great blog assom
    Yet I found over a period of time that the bounce frequency wasn’t going down at all. So I was hosting my blow on AWS and eliminating all unwanted popups and I was able to drastically lower my blog’s bounce level.

  12. Bounce rate can be reduced by focusing on the content in a web page and working on factor mentioned in the article. It was a nice post got some valid tip to reduce the bounce rate. Thanks for sharing.

  13. Amazing article!
    Nicely explained through points. Those are really very effective tips to get started with a blog. Thank you for sharing. Hope it will help me reduce the bounce rate on my blog

  14. Hi Shamsudeen,
    super guide here, great tipa for reducing high bounce rate and increasing dwell time.
    I’d also like to add a simple tip.
    Content tables.
    They are great UX as people can jump to the section they want to read and when they do, they stay and maybe click on internal links and go to other pages.
    Which is great for SEO.
    But tables of content also help with SEO by helping to generate sitelinks under you listing in the SERP. This increases CTR and Google likes it when your listing gets above average CTR.
    It means people like it, and Google follows the people.
    I talk about it in my content table guide.

    1. Hey Nikola,

      Good to have you here, thanks for coming.

      Yes, I do agree with you on content tables. It makes scanning easy and as you said, users can quickly jump to what section is of interest. I will experiment with content tables in some of the how-to guides, hopefully it improves user experience.

      Thanks for sharing your experience here.

  15. Such beautiful information is given by you. A really nice article you and explained very well. Your article post having lots of information. I needed. This saved my lot of time. it was very helpful and useful. Great work.

  16. Hey Adeshokan,

    A high Bounce Rate clearly indicates that your visitors are leaving your blog because either they didn’t find it engaging enough to stay or lack of instinctive navigation after reading the article that they initially landed on.

    And this definitely is a cause of concern.

    Indeed, A good website is about having relevant content. The more focused and relevant your content is, the better search engines will understand what your website offers.

    In my opinion – need to be transparent about how you can help your customers through your call to action.

    Eventually, thanks for sharing these potential facts with us.

    With best wishes,

    Amar Kumar

    1. Hi Amar,

      Thanks once again for being here.

      Transparency is important in online marketing. We are dealing virtually with people we don’t possibly meet in real life.

      Being transparent and providing quality content that helps solve users’ problems will build trust. Consequently, it leads to more time dealing with you on your site which is good for a better bounce rate.

      Thanks, Amar, have a wonderful time.

  17. Hello Adeshokan,

    Awesome post. Nicely explains tricks to reduce bounce rate and to improve user experience. I agreed with your point that popup are annoying and causes increase in bounce rate.

    Regards,
    Deepak

    1. Thanks, Deepak,

      I’m glad you find the post useful. Thank you, and hope to see you here more often.

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