Ways to Reduce Your Blog's Bounce Rate

Anyone can knock on your front door. They could be a postal worker delivering a parcel or a religious evangelist come to save your soul. It could be a neighbor asking if you would move your car or a lost passer-by seeking directions.

These people rarely make it past your doorstep. They arrive with a query or a message, receive their answer and move on into the rest of their lives.

In many ways, they are like the random visitors to your blog. These are the people who come to read a single entry, then click right away into new wonders of the internet.

They are raising your bounce rate through the roof.

Occasionally your doorbell will ring to announce a different kind of visitor. Friends or family smile back at you and they come inside. They will see more than your front porch. They'll wander through the hallway and settle down in the lounge. There's a nice cup of tea in everyone's hands, as they catch up on all of the news.

A successful blogger will treat every individual entering their site as a long-lost friend. Leaving them standing on the landing page should be considered impolite. Invitations to check out other areas will add value to your greeting. As they click onto another page, it is the cyberworld equivalent of you leading them onto a comfortable sofa and offering a nice, warm drink.

That is the way that you bring your bounce rate down.

Every website creator has spent hours agonizing over their homepage. Are the colors right? First impressions are always formed by aesthetics; snap judgements made of patterns and pixels. The content is secondary. It might have been the hook that brought them here, but if the page doesn't look inviting, then the words might not even be read.

Homepages get poured over and tweaked. Endless rounds of feedback from friends and experts cause another experimental redesign. It is important, because this is the portal into your site. It's the door through which your readers and/or potential customers will come. Except it's not.

For bloggers especially, the front door to your blog tends to be individual articles. These are the ones whose links turn up in search engines or get passed around in social networking sites. The entry point for your readers is called the landing page. It is invariably not that wonderful introduction that you spend so long perfecting.

There can be huge clues as to which are your real 'homepages'. They are the blog entries and articles with the highest number of hits. If you wish to be precise about this, then using a tracking program is the way forward. The most popular of these is Google Analytics, but there are others. They will tell you which are your main landing pages and what happened next for those who read them.

At the very least, these are the pages that you should be pouring care and attention upon. Have you triple checked for typos? Are all of your links live? Are your images fantastic and your writing the best that you've ever done?  Forget about your designated homepage. No-one has looked at that since you last asked your mother for her opinion. These are your homepages, so treat them as such. Make them your face to the digital world.

If you want your bounce rate to be reduced, then your top 10 landing pages are where you should be extending the most invitations to come inside. The majority of your readers will have entered through here. If they then exited from it, they have pushed your percentage up. These pages are both the source of your unhappy bounce rate and the greatest opportunity to make it lower.

If you want to be truly brilliant, then treat everything you ever create as your homepage. You never know which will be the one to go viral.

You are staring at a Wizzley page right now. Forget the content for a second and take another look from the point of view of bounce rate. Is there anything here which might persuade you to investigate another page on this website?

I've counted eleven links surrounding just the topmost title. You can visit Wizzley's homepage (twice) or have a choice of the topic category and all the sub-categories leading to Blogging Tips.

Then you get to my profile page, message me, become my fan, look at my articles or peruse my newest output. Clicking any one of them would reduce the bounce rate for either Wizzley as a whole or my own little section of it.

Continue down the right hand sidebar and there are invitations to read other articles. They are contextualized with this one. The wonderful web team here designed it knowing that anyone reading the current article is likely to want to look at others within the same broad topic spectrum. Anyone accepting such an invitation will be lowering the bounce rate percentage for this page.

I didn't leave such important matters to a site template. I had my own welcome to make. Look again at the section headed Understanding Your Blog's Bounce Rate. Right next to it, I inserted a couple of likely links. They are relevant to the article that you are reading. One gives a wider introduction to the same subject. The other provides information on a related field. They would be worth checking out.

(And just in case you did miss that the first time, I've just handed you another link to direct you straight back to it.)

Now scroll down to the comments. If a discussion is in full swing, then there will be an array of links to people's profiles, not least my own. Keep on going and you'll see two tiny links. Here you can print out my article to keep safe amongst your memoirs. Alternatively, if you hate it, you can flag the content and complain about me to the Wizzley team. These are all taking you to other pages. They would knock down that bounce rate.

Finally we reach the footer. It holds nothing but links to the rest of the website. I count fourteen there at the time of writing. They're all necessary and functional, but they could have that dual purpose of navigation to bring down Wizzley's percentage of bouncing readers.

The first time you looked, did you even notice every single one of those invitations to travel further? The secret isn't to merely provide the links, but to make them perfectly integrated to your landing page's content. No-one likes to feel pressured into going elsewhere for all that they came to see. But adding value to your page with promises of more is entirely acceptable. More than that, it should be mandatory!

You have witnessed how Wizzley and I have worked towards inviting our visitors to view more, but what about other sites? 

No-one here is going to be solely a blogger. You are an internet user too. As you surf the 'net, there will be some sites from which you bounce straight off. There will be others which made you stick around. How did they do that? 

Now that you have awareness of bounce rates, keep that question at the back of your mind. Each time you find yourself being drawn into a website, enjoy the content, then go back. Retracing your steps will highlight what it was about the page that made you want more. If it was something that could be emulated on your own blog, then do it! If it worked on you, then it will work on your readers too.

Similarly, if you were about to bounce right off, then pause for a moment and determine why. Is it a mistake that you are making on your own pages? If so, go and get that aspect corrected. You know from experience that it puts people off.

It's ok to experiment. There are millions of websites, books, conference speakers, podcasts and film focused on sharing their own tips on perfect optimization practices, but this is your internet home. You have control of the decor and the statistics at your fingertips. When you get it right through your own observations, then you might have something that no-one else ever thought about before. That's innovation and that could bring in the crowds. Do it!

We've covered a lot of ground, so here is an overview of the ways you can immediately target your bounce rate percentage:

• Look at the aesthetics - does your blog look attractive?
• Identify your landing pages and give them special attention
• Write or otherwise provide more content just like those popular pages (then interlink them)
• Ensure that your blog's navigation provides lots of opportunities for reader exploration
• Check your external links to make sure they open in another window (you don't want people leaving in that way!)
• Add multimedia content, including videos and audio options, such as podcasts
• Work through the rest of your blog/website and imagine each page as a homepage

Above and beyond these tips, you should simply have great content. That is the be all and end all of any blog. Just be the best that you possibly can. They will come.