Encouraging people to read your site content is probably one of your goals as a site owner; however, once visitors land on your site, it’s even more important that they stick around long enough to do so.
If you’re noticing a pattern of visitors who view one page on your site and then leave, they likely came to your site and didn’t find what they were looking for, or they had poor experiences. This leads to having a high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing a single page).
If you’re experiencing a high bounce rate, read on to learn how to keep visitors on your site longer.
How do I determine my bounce rate?
Bounce rate data comes directly from Google Analytics. Connecting Google Analytics to your site is straightforward, You can view your bounce rate on the Audience Overview page within your analytics section.
How to reduce your bounce rate with Jetpack
Jetpack offers several tools that can help to reduce your bounce rate.
1. Enable Related Posts on individual blog posts
When visitors are directed to your site from a Google search or by following a link on social media, your blog posts are probably the first things they see. By enabling Related Posts, you give visitors the chance to read more posts about the same topic, and explore similar posts from your archives. Exposing your visitors to more content also helps you convert them into customers.
Here are a few tips to get the most out of Related Posts:
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Opt for a grid format to give Related Posts more room, and to make them more noticeable.
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Enable post thumbnails to display your related content in a more visually appealing way.
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Customize the section title, encouraging visitors to click through and read your other posts.
You can modify these settings by visiting Jetpack’s settings page as shown below.
2. Break up text with images and galleries
Long paragraphs of text can make your blog posts harder to read, and many people prefer to skim content. You can cater to this audience by writing concise paragraphs broken up by subheadings to make posts easily scannable. This can encourage visitors to read your content in its entirety.
To add a bit of variety to your posts, you can also break up your text with images. Images are a creative way to add more depth to your story. So, it pays to go the extra mile and make sure each post includes an image or two.
Another benefit of adding images to your posts is that it makes your site more social media-friendly. Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Industry Report details how 74 percent of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, as it allows them to drive additional traffic to their websites.
But, what if you want to take this a step further by adding variation to how your images are displayed, or what if you have multiple images that you want to insert into your posts? Use Tiled Galleries to create and display image galleries in three different styles: a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, or a circular grid.
It’s worth mentioning that to save space, captions only appear with the rectangular and square tiled layouts when a visitor hovers over them.
3. Include the option to search
A great way to make sure that visitors can easily locate the information they’re looking for is by including a search box on your site. This allows them to enter the exact terms they’re looking for and find relevant results.
Professional plans add more functionalities to the Search feature. The search widget, which is powered by Elasticsearch, enables you to use a search box, sorting controls, and custom filters. This way, visitors can fine-tune their queries with categories, dates, post types, and more.
4. Make your site responsive
Responsive websites (sites that configure themselves to work across various screen types and sizes) have gone from luxury to necessity. According to research from We Are Social and Hootsuite, more than half of 2017’s worldwide site traffic was generated by way of mobile phones.
Responsive web design can also help you reduce bounce rates, improve conversions and search engine rankings, and provide your visitors with the best possible experiences.
Jetpack can help to make your site responsive in a few ways:
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Themes: The first step towards ensuring that your website is responsive is to use a responsive theme. With Jetpack, you have access to more than 100 professionally-designed themes, and are given even more options through paid plans. You can filter these by category or functionality to find the perfect theme for your site.
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Mobile Themes: If you aren’t ready to switch desktop themes, then enabling a mobile-friendly theme will display your content in a clean and uncluttered manner when viewed on smaller screens.
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Responsive Videos: If you plan on using video as a part of your content offering, make sure to enable Responsive Videos so that mobile users can enjoy them without any technical issues.
5. Proofread your content
It’s crucial that there are no glaring typos or grammatical errors within your pages or blog posts. Aside from making you look unprofessional, a post containing a lot of errors is distracting, which might cause visitors to leave your site.
Save your visitors (and yourself) from the frustration by taking advantage of Jetpack’s proofreading feature. Using After the Deadline technology, Jetpack checks your spelling, grammar, style, and provides options and functionalities like complex phrases and double negatives.
Lower your bounce rate to increase your conversions
Reducing your bounce rate increases the chances of converting visitors into fans, customers, and clients.
Did we miss anything? Share tips for how to reduce your bounce rate in the comments section!
