Blog Bounce Rate: What it is and How You Can Reduce it

Your blog: you work hard on it.

It’s understandable, then, that you want people to interact with it.

For a blogger, nothing is more heartbreaking than knowing that nobody is reading your blogs– despite the fact that you’ve spent hours or days working on each piece.

Unfortunately, many bloggers find themselves in this exact situation!

Luckily, though, there’s something you can do about it. By understanding bounce rates, you can take proactive steps to lower yours – starting today.

What is a “Bounce Rate”?

A bounce rate is the number of readers who abandon your site after visiting one page. A high bounce rate is discouraging and bad for SEO. Because Google evaluates the behavior of users to determine how to rank your page, the search engine interprets a high number of “bounces” to mean that the page is low-quality.

With this in mind, decreasing your blog’s bounce rate is critical to ranking well.

How to Lower Your Blog’s Bounce Rate: 5 Fast Tips

If your blog’s bounce rate is higher than you’d like, follow these five tips to decrease it:

1. Make your blog posts easier to read

If your content is clunky, difficult to read, or formatted poorly, readers are going to leave. If you use WordPress, a plugin like Yoast SEO can help you format your content. For everyone else, here are some tips to get started:

• Break up large chunks of content. Dense paragraphs are a reader’s worst enemy. To make your content user-friendly, break it into paragraphs of no more than 3-4 sentences.
• Use subheaders. Subheaders are great for readability and SEO. To use them correctly, insert them into your text at 300-word intervals. Format them with the H2 tag and include relevant keywords.
• Simplify your language. Simple language is easier to read. Ideally, every post you write should feature an 8th-grade reading level. If you’re not sure what an 8th-grade reading level looks like, enable the Flesch-Kincaid feature in Microsoft Word, or use an app like Hemingway.

2. Make your headlines irresistible

While 80% of people read headlines, only 20% read body copy. This means that the better your headlines, the higher the chances people will stick with your content rather than “bouncing” off of your page.

To make your headlines more exciting to readers, use action words, address the reader directly, and run your headline through a tool like the Advanced Marketing Institute’s headline analyzer before you publish it.

3. Limit the ads on your blog

According to HubSpot, 73% of users dislike online popup ads, and 91% believe that ads are more intrusive today than a few years ago. What’s more, Google announced earlier this year that it will start punishing sites that display disruptive pop-up and interstitial ads.

With this in mind, be careful with ads on your blog. If you’re going to show ads, stick with small banner ads at the top of the screen – the type that the user doesn’t have to click past before they can access your content.

4. Build out your link strategy

To make your blog more appealing, create a good link strategy. Ideally, you should have a healthy mix of internal links (links to your site or content) and external links (links to relevant third-party sources) in your content.

To use links correctly, attach them to relevant anchor text and use sources with a domain authority score of greater than 50.

5. Add visuals to your blogs

While adding a picture or a screenshot to your blog may seem simple, HubSpot reports that adding a colored visual to a piece of content boosts people’s willingness to read it by 80%. With this in mind, use in-depth screenshots, quality stock photos, or personal images to illustrate the key points of your blogs.

Smaller Bounce Rates Start Here

While decreasing your blog’s bounce rate may seem insurmountable, these five tips make it easy to get started. By making your content more readable, improving your headlines, limiting ads, building out your link strategy, and improving your content with visuals, it’s easy to slash your bounce rate and start reaping the benefits of lingering readers.

Dave is the CEO of Dave’s Computers Inc. He writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips covering the best tips about blogging and Internet marketing. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Original post: Blog Bounce Rate: What it is and How You Can Reduce it

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