Why do you have a poor bounce rate?
Well, technically, you have a poor bounce rate when someone comes to your site and leave after that regardless of whether he or she reads your content or not.
From this situation, I can say that you might have an uninteresting content that drive them away or you have a nice content written but nowhere for your reader to click further to read more.
Any of these situation is not a good sign for a blog so before going into fixing your bounce rate, I would advice you to start looking into the problem first. Here are six elements that could lead your blog to a poor bounce rate.
#1 – Poor blog design
If you have a poor blog design where your readers find it difficult to find your content, they will leave before reading it. If you have a high contrast site using colors such as yellow as background, they will leave before they go blind.
I know I am not in the position to talk about design here because I am not a domain expert in this, but at least I always maintain a clean design so that you will find it comfortable to stay for long.
#2 – Irrelevant content
If you are hosting a blog about making money and suddenly you write an article about how to choose the right furniture for your house, chances of your incoming reader for this article will bounce off is pretty high.
This is because these visitors are there because they want to know more about furniture and your making money blog has very little thing to do with it. As a result, they will not be interested your your remaining article and just leave after that.
#3 – Too many Advertisements
You can advertise but you should never over-do it. Try to advertise in the way that you do not distract your reader’s visual in reading your content. The reason why you have too many advertisement on your blog is you will start to disturb the visual of your blog.
Your visitors might also start to think as well whether it is a blog to share knowledge or just to put some contents for money making purposes. So, don’t flood with advertisements and chase your visitors away.
#4 -Slow loading speed
If your site don’t load fast enough for the first time, people might give you another chance because it might be the internet connection issue. If your site doesn’t load fast again, you left only the patient people on this earth to browse your web site and the percentage of these people is very low.
The world is moving fast today and if your blog is not keeping up, there is something you should do over there to improve your site loading speed.
#5 – No internal linking
Internal linking at times looks like a call-to-action for your readers to read more about your articles. If you inter link your contents well, people will keep reading and reading where this action will make your bounce rate lower.
However, if you don’t do any internal linking, chances of them leaving your blog after reading your article is pretty high and that will drive your bounce rate high.
#6 – Archives, About and Search matter
Let say you just wrote an awesome post and it goes viral on the social media where everyone is talking about. So the visitors that read that post might want to know you and your articles more.
Having an About page enables them to know you better.
Having a search widget enables them to be able to find more of your relevant contents.
Having an Archive page enables them to learn more about your previous contents.
Not having any of those pages above drives your visitors away which leads to a poor bounce rate.
The conclusion
So, before you begin optimizing your bounce rate, ensure that you know what is the main problem behind first.
Don’t simply just fix things which is not an problem and you might just create more problems from there.
If you have a poor bounce rate, run through this article again and see if your site has any of the problems mentioned. By knowing your problems, the fixing part can be easier.
Let us know as well what sort of things that drives your bounce rate high.
Hi Alan,
Excellent posts on Bounce rate. Previous & this post are very informative.
Thanks for sharing.
~@khajamoin1
Khaja moin recently posted..52 Dofollow Blogs List to Comment
Thanks for the comments there, Khaja. 😉
The content has the ability to attract as much readers as it can but a sober design is something that has some great relevance in decreasing the bounce rate of ones blog. If the site has too many add posted on it then it looks bulky and takes time to load the page which annoys the readers as well as new visitors. So that should be avoided.
Aditya recently posted..MLM Software India
Thanks for your comment, Aditya.
Simply explained, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing a single page. The importance of this rate depends on the kind of website you have. Naturally lower the bounce rate, means that you are attracting the right visitors and higher means you are not. The factors that contribute to high bounce rates are pop-up ads, music, irrelevant content etc. Checking these will naturally control bounce rate. Thanks for the insightful post!
Yeps, you have your facts there. Thanks for commenting.
Sites that take too long to load or those with bugs and glitches irk and discourage me from pursuing further. If there is an area that we all urgently need to work on, this would be it and I say this because this is the first point of contact we have with our potential readers. Thanks!
Joy recently posted..Network Letter Bin
Thanks for your comment, Joy.
Hi Alan! I couldn’t agree with you more–we should definitely look into areas that we need to improve on to address this concern. Thanks!
Kristine recently posted..Hello world!
Thanks for your comment, Kristine.
I really need to lower my site’s bounce rate. This has been my problem for months. I’ll go take note of some of the things pointed out here.
Do let me know what is the outcome after that, Veronica.
Now this got me conscious about my websites’ high bounce rate. I hope I can still do some tweaks to lower it.
Kelly recently posted..SuiteDash – top project management system
I’m sure you can, Kelly. Thanks for your comment there.
This article pushed me to research more about bounce rates and its effects on my website. Now, I know how to relate it to the traffic that my blog has been getting.
Great! Thanks for your comment there, Calra.
Totally agree with this, especially with the poor blog design! So many websites (not just blogs either, but company sites!) I visit have horrible, horrible layouts that either make me want to weep for the sake of all the undiscovered and underpaid web artists there are out there, or gouge my eyes out because seriously, we’re in the 21st century. Comic Sans and neon backgrounds have got to go. A pleasant design, even if it’s a simple one, will help ensure that readers will come back to view your content. You wouldn’t really look for diamonds in a garbage dump, now would you?
Exactly Sandra. That’s my point. Diamonds in a garbage dump could probably be just another garbage 😉
Thanks for your comment.
Before, I really didn’t mind anything about bounce rates at all. This article gave me a good insight about it and shall be looking into it how to lower my blog’s bounce rate.
Stacey recently posted..New Years Eve Cruise in Sydney 2012 Harbour Fireworks Cruise!
Hope you find it useful, Stacey 😉