Up until recently, blogging for the purpose of gaining visibility online was either unheard of, or rare, but these days, so many blogs are being created that it is becoming practically a mystery to Internet marketers how they should go about making their blogs stand out from the crowd – and according to stats, not many are nailing it.
As far as blogging goes, there are many types of blogs, andvarious reasons why people create them, but irrespective of your reasons for maintaining a blog, some rules apply no matter what the circumstances are. Many bloggers use analytics tools (like Google Analytics) to keep a tab on how their blog is doing. Sometimes what they see there is not pretty, especially when it comes to the metric called “bounce rate“.
Put quite simply, if you didn’t figure this one out yet, the bounce rate of your blog is a measure of the percentage of people who leave your site from the same page they entered it. This means that they left the page without visiting any other page on your website. Now this happens all the time. Sometimes people just enter the wrong site and they immediately click the “Back” button, but a high bounce rate is indicative of the fact that
- Your landing page is not relevant to your target audience
- Your website is poor
- Your blog is not nearly as interesting as it should be for it to work for you
Note that websites with relatively low bounce rates tend to have better rankings in Google and other search engines as well.
Let’s talk about some steps that you can take to reduce the bounce rate on your website. Keep these in mind when creating pages or posts for your website and you should be decreasing your bounce rate in no time.
1. Add internal links at the top of your pages
Perhaps the easiest and most effective way for you to reduce your bounce rate without even doing anything really is to use internal links at the top of your pages. This is easy to do and you should start adding internal links to every one of your pages and posts right away!
2. Avoid irrelevant ads
Being greeted with an outrageously excessive number of ads when first landing on your website can be a great turn-off for yourvisitors and the first thing they are most likely to do is hit the “Back” button. I mean, wouldn’t you? We are especially talking about the intrusive blocks of ads and ridiculous banners that are displayed right in the middle of the content.
3. Your pages should load fast
Remember that not everyone has access to fast Internet connections (and not everyone has a great deal of patience!). People don’t like waiting for ages just to see what’s on a page – especially since there are many other pages that would take only a couple of seconds to load. If you want the bounce rate for your blog to decrease, make sure to decrease your page-load time. To do that, here are a few action steps you may want to take.
- Analyze your page load times with Pingdom Tools
- Use the “Save for web” option for your images in Photoshop and GIMP
- Don’t use HTML to resize your images. Avoid animated GIF images
4. Simplify your language
Okay people, if you own a blog, remember that blogs are not peer-reviewed or refereed journals. You are bloggers, not PhD candidates fighting their dissertation. top using the big grammar thinking that you will impress your readers. You will probably only end up giving them a headache and they will hit the “Back” button. Even worse, they will probably avoid you in the future like the plague. So what you should do is keep your academic qualifications aside and work towards giving your readers the information they need, presented in a way they will understand right away.
5. Calls-to-action need to be specific
There is a common practice among bloggers these days that they tend to try andsave on content creation by trying to kill 12,000 birds with just one stone.
“Like this on Facebook! Buy this! Sign up for that! Oh, check this ad out! Do everything!”
This will lead to an increase in the bounce rate of your blog for the simple reason that people will find it hard to understand why your blog is there in the first place. As such, your calls-to-action need to be specific. If you want your visitors to join an email list, justsay so. If you want them to buy an e-book you are selling, just tell them to click the “Buy Now Button”.