Are you worried that your bounce rate is too high and that you’re not getting visitors interested in your content? And what does bounce rate percentage actually indicate for your business results?
The only thing worse than a terrible reaction is having none—this is what bounce rate is all about.
Suppose your efforts result in a high abandon rate, with no visitor interest in scratching the surface of your content and exploring to discover what it is about.
If you are experiencing this, you are probably doing something wrong, and you will get the chance to figure out what in today’s article.
We will explain what bounce rate is, how to calculate it, and how to reduce bounce rate on your blog, so you increase the engagement on your website.
Let’s begin!
What Is Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate reflects how your landing page’s visitors interact with your content — how many users land on your website and decide to leave instead going to the next page.
That behavior is also known as a single-page session.
How to Calculate Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate calculation is quite simple — you need to divide the number of single-page sessions by the total number of sessions to get the bounce rate percentage.
And what to do with the results you’ll get? First, compare them with the average bounce rates for websites:
Lower bounce rates indicate that you gave enough reasons for the user to stay on the first page and click to a second page. This is the mission of the blog!
A higher bounce rate indicates that your blog content is not engaging enough to invoke interaction — people can't find what they are looking for to stay on the page.
Repurposing your content or creating a blog conversion funnel are excellent methods for lowering your bounce rates. But we will get to more specific instructions soon enough.
To help you better grasp a reasonable bounce rate for your blog content, let's look at typical bounce rates based on industry standards:
Common Reasons For A Bad Bounce Rate?
Here are the most common reasons for high bounce rates:
1. Slow site speed — Users want to get their information quickly. If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, your visitors can feel impatient and depart.
2. Self-sufficient content — Creating helpful content is one thing. Providing all the information in a single blog article is another. If your readers get all information they need too quickly, they will have no reason to explore further.
3. Misleading title tag or meta descriptions — You are probably familiar with 'click baits' already (title points to one thing but leads you to something completely else). You should keep the answers to each search query reliable, because Google penalizes websites with misleading information.
4. Broken links — If visitors leave the page after only a few seconds and your bounce rate is unusually high, your page is probably blank, producing a 404 or not loading correctly.
5. Single-page websites — If you're an advertiser, the entire purpose of your page can be to purposefully direct visitors to the merchant's website rather than your own. Such websites usually have higher bounce rates.
6. Bad quality of the content — Every content writer knows that people first scan through the content before deciding to read it. Therefore, if your content is plain, people will probably try to search for a better alternative.
7. Content is not mobile-friendly — When surfing or purchasing on their smartphone, 50% are more inclined to utilize a mobile site. Therefore, if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will reduce the relevancy of your content for a large number of consumers.
Now that you know what could go wrong, let's look at how to reduce the bounce rate on your blog to improve your content performance and amplify your chances of conversion.
7 Hacks On How to Reduce the Bounce Rate on Blog
1. Figure Out What Drives Visitors Away
Before you proceed with any other steps, you must first discover what is wrong with your blog page.
If users visit your website and immediately leave, instead of looking around, try to reproduce their experience objectively. To begin, consider the following questions:
- What is the user's first impression of the page?
- Can users quickly identify the issues they want to solve?
- Is your content personalized for a targeted audience?
- Is your content marketing funnel well-planned?
- Have you incorporated CX writing in your content strategy?
It would be a shame to waste your efforts creating engaging content due to lousy website organization.
It is exceedingly difficult to keep up with your competitors in terms of getting new leads and much more challenging to keep them actively yours.
Thus, it is vital to figure out your website bounce performance — for instance, you can utilize the Google analytics tool to keep track of:
- Time spent on-site.
- The bounce rate.
- Page count per session.
- Pages that are the most ad the least visited.
- And a lot more.
Here is what Google Analytics overview looks like:
With each answer you find, you will better understand what you need to do to optimize your bounce rate.
2. Suggest Content To Your Visitors
If the content on a specific page was not what the visitor was looking for, rather than simply dismissing it, you could use popups to assist them in finding what they search for before leaving your site.
You can use tools such as Poptin free tool to recommend posts that can be more useful or related to the user’s search intent.
Additionally, you can use exit popups to provide a content upgrade, discount, or free shipping voucher.
Popups will help keep your visitors engaged and interested while exploring your blog page.
3. Personalize Content For Targeted Audience
You need to understand that not all bounces are bad. Hence, creating high-quality content personalized for your targeted audience is essential.
But, to boost traffic to your website and conversion rates, you need to provide your leads with the most relevant content.
For instance, if your lead is on your page looking for medical advice, you will not offer them a blog post for good communication skills.
To master audience targeting, you can utilize AI writing assistants such as TextCortex and quickly create relevant content.
Additionally, TextCortex’s Chrome extension allows you generate your targeted content within every textbox — LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Hemingway, Slack, etc.
You can use it to rewrite your sentences, expand your text, create blog posts and write emails.
Another significant source of bouncing is search engine result pages (SERPs).
A visitor who clicks on a search result is looking for something specific, and if they do not find the answer or solution immediately, they will bounce.
By providing your visitors with customized content and offers based on the pages they visit, traffic source, and other factors, you are filtering the targeted audience that will stay on your site.
You can also limit a campaign's visibility to visitors who have scrolled a specific distance down the page or spent a given amount of time on the page.
Displaying tailored content will assist you in lowering your bounce rate and increasing engagement and conversions.
4. Display External Media Onsite
Many companies incorporate streams of their own social media or video content to provide the most recent updates to attract more website traffic.
However, this can create a gap resulting in an unintentional bounce. Your potential visitors can come across an intriguing Instagram post and click on it.
Even if they proceed to your social network, this counts as a bounce if this is the only page on your site they visited.
To avoid such a scenario, you can use free social sharing media platforms, such as Mashshare to optimize the social sharing of your website.
These plugins allow you to create attractive social network feeds on your website.
They will entice users to click on an image or video to view the caption, description, and comments without leaving your website.
5. Help Visitors Find Their Way
Here is the part that most people overlook — imagine yourself as a website visitor. Wouldn’t it be frustrating to scroll 70% of the page and hardly find what you are looking for?
Of course, it would. Thus, don’t forget to navigate your visitors through your website.
Here are some ideas on how to achieve that:
- Make sure your content answers the question people are searching for.
- If the blog post has many sections, consider using the table of contents to help them jump straight to the part that interests them the most.
Organizing your content can improve your website customer experience and help your visitors quickly get to the point.
6. Match Your CTA To User Intent
You have probably heard about this already — sometimes, you need to tell people to do something to get desirable results.
We achieve this using call-to-action buttons, especially if they match user intent.
CTAs are classified into four types:
Let's say your visitor is about to find a blog post to help him understand how he can adjust graphic preferences on his computer for a video game.
If you utilize transactional CTA to get him to buy a new graphics card, he will almost certainly leave.
Instead, you can use CTA to pique his interest in your blog article that offers a comparative review between two hardware that provides a great visual experience when playing games.
That is the most subtle way of getting people interested in your selling without being obnoxious.
Then, in that same article, present a referral coupon for your brand.
Knowing your visitor's intent will ensure that all of your content supports that intent and make them trust your judgment.
7. Ensure That Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
With the advancement of technology, there is an increasing number of screen sizes, input methods, and device capabilities that can visit your website.
Many bounce events occur when a person accesses your site but can't browse or visualize part of the content efficiently. Therefore, content quality is irrelevant if it takes forever to load.
Did you know that a 0.1-second increase in mobile page speed can increase conversions by 8.4 percent?
Here are some more statistics regarding mobile site optimization to remind you of its importance:
A responsive site saves you from losing views due to poor website optimization.
Final Thoughts
Understanding a content marketing strategy's shortcomings and poor results is just as important as developing a strong one.
Data regarding bounce rates are not always alarming. Instead, they can be used as navigational markers to highlight areas of your content plan that need minor tweaks to yield even better outcomes.
Where can I find the time to accomplish all that? Guess what — you don't have to do all those tasks manually.
Maintaining your website's reputation includes producing content consistent with a high caliber.
For instance, using TextCortex can save 80% of your writing time, which you can use to improve your website and make each blog post relevant to your targeted audience.
The output you will get with each generation is consistently engaging, unique, and human-like.
TextCortex can generate any content you need within seconds, allowing you to produce up to 10x more content than you do manually.
And, as a strawberry on the cake, you don't have to buy it to give it a try.
Our free version includes the Chrome extension and provides 15 free daily creations with no feature limitations.
All you need to do is to create an account, and pick desirable content to start your automatic content generation ride.
Sounds tempting?
Sign up today, and see how TextCortex transform your thoughts into compelling content while establishing you as a trustworthy source that people gladly return to.