9 SEO Best Practices: How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Have you been a while in the online marketing game? Then you’ll know that there are several SEO best practices to abide by.

• Consistent exhaustive and semantic content,
• persuasive headlines with promising meta descriptions,
• optimize your images and files for improved general website speed,
• internal linking, 
• include keywords in post URLs and domain names, and, 
• building more powerful backlinks.

But as far as best practices for SEO is concerned, you should always aim to improve the time a website visitor spends on your site, viewing page. That is what we call bounce rate!

First off…

What is Bounce Rate? 

Bounce rates are an important metric for understanding a site’s overall user experience. 

Google defines bounce rate as:

“The percentage of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).”

Basically, this means that when a visitor “bounces” from a page, they have left the page and site after only viewing one page and not moving further on the site. High Bounce Rates are usually an indication that something is negatively impacting the user experience on the site, making them leave before using the site more.  

Let’s jump into our top ten tips to reduce Bounce Rates so your website can succeed in converting users to your intended goal! 

How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate and Improve Conversion

1. Optimize Page Load Speed

When a user has to wait an excessive amount of time for a page load, it creates an incredibly poor user experience, hence there’ll be bounces.

The content on the page does not matter if a visitor cannot even see it immediately, and often leads to users impatiently leaving the site. Therefore, the faster you can make your website load, the lesser your website bounce rate. 

2. Include a Site Search Option and Navigation Bar

If a user is searching for something specific, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find it without leaving the page. 

Therefore including a site search function can be extremely useful. Also, an intuitive navigation bar can help easily lead the user to the page they are looking for, so make sure your website has a simple and clearly laid out section. 

3. Make Mobile Responsiveness A Priority 

Mobile users have even less patience than desktop users. A website should have a design that is responsive and mobile-optimized to provide users on mobile devices the best experience. 

4. Ensure Content Readability

Make sure your content is easy to read both in design and format. Users generally prefer short organized information to long paragraphs.

You’ll want to be checking your readability score so that the information is easy to digest. 

5. Utilize Different Forms of Content 

Another focus area when it comes to website readability is to create various forms of content for the user, as opposed to only text.

Video content is incredibly engaging and easily grabs attention and high-quality images can also help to captivate the attention of visitors to a website and potentially reduce bounce rates.

6. Use Relevant Keywords 

Make sure that your website features the relevant keywords that apply to your site. 

A website that has lots of content, no enough or without the relevant keywords in the content, can rank high for a keyword, but a user will quickly bounce from the website, which in turn affects its ranking in SERPs next time.

7. If Possible, Stay Away from Popups

Users generally do not enjoy popups and find them to be invasive to their experience. Popups usually reduce trust in users sometimes, because popups and popunders may signal that a site is tacky and pushy. 

Also, [bctt tweet=”the irritation popups and popunders create is contrary to a positive user experience (UX)”]. 

If you can do without leads, or have another way to grow your email list without any “pops”, then it’s an SEO best practice to remove them completely from your website, to help improve bounce rate.

8. Limit Broken Links

A large number of broken links will always create a poor user experience, leaving a visitor to a website dissatisfied and frustrated if they cannot locate the content that they want to find. 

There are a few different ways to locate all of the broken links on a website, such as through Google Search Console.

On WordPress-hosted sites, there are many available tools to locate any broken links, site-wide, and the option to either replace or remove such links in a few clicks.

7. Show Off Credibility

[bctt tweet=”Visitors are always looking for how trustworthy a site is before they use it.”]

With any analytics tool, you can easily spot that one of the most visited pages of a website is the “Contact Us,” and the “About” pages of that website.

In order to help establish this trust, it is a good idea to include positive reviews of whatever products and/or services your site features and to include certifications or seals of approval that your website has. 

It will also pay off to include highly trusted other resources.

9. Use Google Analytics to Track Issues and Progress 

To know the height of your progress so far, you’ll want to employ the Google Analytics tool. Finally, you can track any major issues that come up on your site by using Google Analytics.  

Google Analytics can track:

• Time on site.
• Bounce rate.
• Pages per session.
• Most popular posts and pages (based on a time frame). 
• Frequently and least frequently visited pages.

You can view how users react to pages and then adjust and test changes on those pages accordingly.

Using analytics to peek at your performances and apply fixes whenever necessary will boost bounce rate over time.

Conclusion and Take-Aways: 

You never want to lose valuable visitors to your website over issues that can be avoided. And bounce rate is one of such. Implement these top 9 SEO Best Practices and tips to optimize your user experience and quickly reduce high bounce rates.

Done!

I will need to know your opinions in the comments. Let’s keep it posted!