subject: How To Prevent A High Bounce Rate [print this page] If you plan on owning a website or blog, you should find out what bounce rate means. Finding out how your web property stacks up on this concept is a crucial step towards improving both the value of what you offer on your site and the corresponding monetary rewards attached to that value.
The term basically refers to the percentage at which visitors leave your pages as soon as they land on them. As you can well imagine, websites can have high or low rates. Common sense should tell you though that there is nothing to be excited about registering a high figure. This simply means that a lot of people tend to navigate away from your site even before they can explore it in greater depth. A high bounce rate in analytics software can be interpreted as potential income lost.
It is therefore in your best interest to find out how you can prevent a high incidence of visitors immediately leaving your site. You'd want to keep visitors longer so they can take action on a variety of your offers or recommendations. Even if selling isn't your primary intention, you still want more visitors to stay longer so they can explore the information that you've worked so hard to piece together on your site.
The best way to keep your visitors glued to your site is to offer high quality, unique and useful content. This is really the most obvious way to lower your site's bounce rate because people search online for information that they can use. If you have that in your website or blog, then there is no reason for visitors to jump out too quickly.
Variety of content is also crucial. For most site owners, the easiest way to put information on a site is to create articles or pay someone else to write and slap these on their web pages. Clearly though, not every individual is crazy about reading text. You can prevent turning off people who hate reading by using attractive, informative and creative visual displays. This doesn't mean creating flashy designs for your site. What this really means is putting together videos and images.
Your bounce rate in analytics software might also register a lower figure if you used keywords strategically. As most SEO experts know, the placement of keywords on pages is essential to getting more traffic. You will however be more likely to keep the traffic that you get if you targeted key phrases that are specific. Think about it. If you've ever used a search engine before to look for information, you would have most likely typed in specific terms rather than broad ones. If you therefore use specific phrases on your pages, you will be able to draw more topic specific interested visitors.
In short, you can significantly reduce your website's bounce rate if you produce high quality, varied content and if you optimize your pages for the right keywords. Although the actual execution of this can take time and a lot of effort, the concept is simple enough. As long as you keep this in mind, you can solve the problem of people leaving your pages too early.
