In most of the cases, it’s wise to spend some time and energy to reduce bounce rates at your site, because it will make your site more sticky. If you don’t expect your visitors to read through various pages of your site, you don’t need to worry about the bounce rates.If you want to keep your visitors on your site till you lead them to take action somewhere, it will be highly important to reduce bounce rates at certain pages of your site.

What’s Bounce Rate?

The percentage of single-page visits is defined as the bounce rate of your site.  In other words, it indicates the percentage of the visitors who arrive at one of your webpages and exit from the same page without navigating to the other pages. So, each page could have a different bounce rate. You can find the ones that matter most to you and try to improve them.

Such issue may have been caused by various factors. However, if you want your visitors to become more engaged at your site and navigate more, here are seven ways to do so:

1) Increase Content Relevancy!

Generally you lead visitors from other pages or sites to certain pages of your site. The content at those pages should be as relevant as possible to the landing pages. Otherwise, the content of the page will disappoint them and they exit the site form its entrance page. The more this occurs, the higher the bounce rates will be.

2) Craft Appealing Content!

People search for fresh content on their topics, they look for solutions to their problems, they want effective and experience-proven information, etc. If the content at your landing page isn’t appealing to them, chances are they leave your site right from the same page they’ve entered.So, you have to spend some time and energy to make your content more appealing to the people who land at those pages of yours.

Time is extremely important for the people surfing the web. Also, they have lots of other options – your competitors. So, optimizing your site pages to reduce bounce rates can keep your potential visitors at your pages and convert them to clients.

3) Offer Complementary Content!

To make sure your visitors can get a lot out of your site, make sure you have some additional content related to the one of the landing page so that they can go there to read more. Your content should give more than what people expect. This can be accomplished by including links to the related content that complement the topic you’re talking about.

4) Plan Appealing Navigation!

Many visitors leave your site just because they don’t find anything ELSE at your page. If they find other interesting content at your site, they will surely navigate to those pages to find out more about additional information, products, services, etc. Such links should be persuasive. They need to be easily seen, highly relevant, remarkably incentive and so on. If you have such appealing navigation possibility at your site, you can reduce bounce rates at various pages of your site.

5) Include Call to Action!

Your landing page may have all the required information for your visitors and even turns out to be very attractive to them, but if you cannot lead them to take action, they may exit your site form the same entrance page. On the other hand, if you invite them to download your free report, get a trial version of your software, get one free chapter of your ebook, subscribe to your newsletter and/or services, and so forth, you will be able to lead them to another page to learn more about what’s available for them. This way you give them more to benefit from.

6) Create Thank You Page!

Once your visitors take action and click on a link to purchase, download, subscribe, etc, you get their information to perform what they’ve asked for. The next step will be to lead them to the “Thank You” page. Sometimes, the action you call them to is done at the same page without navigating to another page. However, if you plan such call to actions so that they end up on a page to be thanked, you will be able to lead them to the other sections of your site as well. This prevents the increase of bounce rates. Also, you may make them more interested in what you have to offer.

7) Consider Fast Loading Time!

Time is gold on the web. Not everyone has got access to the same internet speed you may have at your place. Your site visitors could be from some geographical areas where they still use low-speed dial-up services. If your landing page doesn’t load quickly, they may give up and exit your site. Then, your competitor with presumably less-attractive content will attract your visitors.

How to Check Your Bounce Rates

Web Analytics is the solution to help you check upon your bounce rate. You may use some services like alexa.com to see your site’s overall bounce rate, but to discover the details of every individual page’s bounce rate, you can use Google Analytics service. It’s free and fantastic, constantly improving and offering more and more features to its users.

When you install Google analytics code and activate it, you will be able to study the bounce rates of all your pages by going to “Content > Top Content”. Then, on one column, you can see the separate percentages calculated for each of your pages. Some of them are lower and some higher. Depending on the nature of the content they have and their positions on the planned route, it may be natural and expected to have high bounce rates at some pages while others are with low percentage of exit.

In any case, if you plan a route for your visitors to go to the final page to take action, make sure you the bounce rates of the earlier pages before the final one are as low as possible. On the contrary, if the bounce rates of your action pages are high, it wouldn’t mean that you have to reduce it, because it could be what you’ve planned for that page – for instance, at the pages where you send visitors to the affiliate sites.

The last word …

The 7 ways to reduce bounce rates introduced above are some of the most outstanding methods to achieve this. I invite you to suggest other methods if you recall any other solutions for accomplishing this.