Ever looked at your website’s analytics to find your “Bounce Rate” is sky-high? Having a high Bounce Rate means that people are landing on your page, then quickly jumping off that page. High Bounce Rates aren’t good for your website for many reasons, including SEO and, more importantly, your website’s overall success.
It’s one thing getting people onto your website or blog, but keeping them there — engaged with what your website has to offer — is the most important thing. But how do you reduce your Bounce Rate?
In this article, I’m going to go through 3 ways to significantly improve your bounce rate. Each of these methods has a proven record of improving bounce rates. You can test each method to see which ones work best for your website.
#1 Don’t Use Click-Bait Titles
I cannot stress enough that your titles should not be exaggerating or misleading in any way, AKA click-bait. Optimizing your titles to improve your click-thru rates is very important. We have discussed it before on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
You need to make sure your titles stand out and properly target the kinds of users you want to visit your site. But the information included in the linked web pages needs to meet the expectations set out to the readers in the title.
However, many websites are tempted to change their titles so they grab a user’s attention. But their titles do not match their content, leading users to click away.
A good example of this is from some news and celebrity gossip sites. These kinds of sites include titles that are angled in a way to make the linked story seem very controversial when the article is totally misleading. However, these titles are often very misleading. Which leads to new users not trusting these sites, high bounce rates, and poor SEO rankings.
So, you need to make sure none of your webpage titles are misleading your visitors. Try and go through all of your webpage and blog article titles and optimize them to be click-worthy but not click-bait!
#2 Embedding Videos
Embedding videos into your web pages is a great way to improve your bounce rates. Embedded videos that relate to the content a website visitor is reading keeps the user engaged for much longer.
Now, I just want to make it very clear that the videos you include on any given web page have to be relevant to the context of that particular page. You can do this by recreating your blog posts into videos. You can do this by creating video scripts based on your articles and producing videos, either using yourself or an actor to deliver the information.
The area of your webpage where you embed the video is also important. Ideally, you’d place the video just below the introduction of your article. In most cases, the video placed below the intro will be “above the fold” — meaning the video will be instantly visible in most cases.
#3 Improving & Updating Your Content
If your bounce rates are high, but your titles aren’t click-bait, the likelihood is that your content either needs improving or updating. This means you need to relook at your content and either revamp the entire piece of content or look for areas that need updating.
One thing I personally like to do is look at intros. How does the article begin and is it enticing enough? Often, most users click away due to poorly written introductions that don’t engage them or give them useful information right away.
You should also look to better target the keywords you’re writing for. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to keyword-stuff your article. It’s more important that you include as much relevant information that relates to your article’s keyword as possible.
Also, look at any date-specific information or data within each article that could be outdated. For example, if you have an article with information that is referenced from 2018, your article could probably be updated with data from the current year.
Overall, you should look to improve the readability and delivery of your content and make sure it includes as much updated and useful information as possible.
Boosting Your SEO Rankings
There are many different ways to improve bounce rates, but the best practices are to keep your content fresh, engaging, and as informative as possible. By following the suggestions in this article you can start to improve your content and reduce your bounce rates.
When you get your content right, your bounce rates go down. When your bounce rates go down, search engine algorithms see lower bounce rates as a positive thing and rank your content higher.
For more information on how to improve your marketing strategy and grow your business in 2021, read through some of the latest posts on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James