Having a high bounce rate can be frustrating. If you’re unaware of what exactly bounce rate refers to – it’s simply the number of visitors who landed on your page and left without exploring any other pages.
If you’re an online marketer that is looking out for long term results, you want your website to be interesting and compelling enough. You want your visitors to stay longer on your website and check out other pages as well.
A high bounce rate can be bad especially when you’re investing your hard-earned money into advertising and content creation. So how do you really go about working on lowering this rate? What measures can you take to ensure your site’s engaging enough?
You need to make a good first impression and see to it that your website doesn’t have any usability issues. This allows you to improve the visitor retention and helps you with your bounce rate issues.
Focus on Better Ad Placement
There is nothing wrong in running ads on your website. If you’ve got good content then your ads can bring you nice revenue. However, the cold hard truth is that people don’t like seeing excessive ads. If your page is drowning in advertisements then it’s going to be a definite turn off for your visitors.
This is why your ad placement needs to be intelligently planned out. If you’re going to have ads close to the website’s navigation or clutter up the opening part of your page then a lot of your visitors will be forced to leave. Work on having a clean look on your site and think from the visitor’s point of view.
Minimize the Third Party Content
If you want to spice up your website with third party widgets or content then you better do it smartly. Or else you’re going to slow down your pages. And if your pages load slow then you’ll have a hard time getting your visitors explore your site further.
People online have a short attention span and they don’t really have time to wait around. The solution to this is to have your website’s content load first and have the third party content load in the background. This way your visitors will immediately have access to the ‘meat’ and won’t feel like they’re facing a slow page.
Don’t Confuse Your Visitors
Any page that you drive traffic to on your site needs to be crystal clear about the message it’s giving out. Get to the point and don’t leave your visitors confused because it will lead to a high bounce rate.
The last thing you want is your visitor hunting for the information about the purpose of your website. You should communicate your message to your visitors through the content and as well as the design of your site.
You can do this by creating specific feature pages, having your content organized, using compelling headlines and of course having strong call to actions. That’s how you impress your visitors with your site’s clarity.
How do you work on bringing down your website’s bounce rate? What steps do you take to make your site more appealing? Please leave your comments in the box below.
