You’ve set up your blog, finalised all the content and are sitting back and watching the traffic boost your site’s rankings.
However, one thing that might have slipped your mind is bounce rate, and unfortunately, despite perfecting everything else on the site, mess this up and Google will penalise you for it.
Now, nobody wants poor bounce rate to be the reason why their site doesn’t perform well, so we’ve asked the SEO and content experts here at Passion Digital to provide you with some tips on keeping users’ eyes glued to your digital page.
Why you should avoid pop-ups and a bad user experience?
Given that us users spend most of our day on the internet, whether that’s blogging, finance or even journalism, it’s no surprise that we’ve become an unpatient bunch. We arrive in hordes to sites and lose interest within seconds.
Herein lies the problem for digital platforms: if more people visit your site, there’s a higher chance that an increased number of people will come across bad online experiences that could see them leave the page with zero interaction.
In turn, this will contribute towards metrics that deem a page ‘bad’ for Google, such as bounce rate, time on site, number of sessions etc – not something you want to be facing if your site is to drive traffic and boost rankings.
Two main reasons why bad UX will increase your bounce rate
Negative user experiences could tie into your bounce rate, creating a vicious cycle of fewer and fewer people interacting with your site. This could happen if:
- Your audience becomes annoyed – spam ads, buffering videos, 404’s and auto-play could all lead to the user becoming frustrated, climaxing to the cardinal sin: forcing the user to leave the page.
- Google will act on this and see it as a clear signal to decrease the authority of the page, meaning the chances of your page being visible in Google will consistently decrease.
Can mobile optimisation help decrease bounce rate?
With more and more people using their mobiles for relevance and convenience, it seems fitting to think that more and more companies need to reflect this to keep their users engaged.
This means that mobile optimisation is more relevant than ever and imperative that users accessing your website from all devices have a good experience so ensure the site is fast and the information is presented neatly.
Improving Page Load Speed
Whether you’ve finally found an answer to a question that’s been bugging you all week, or you’ve sat down to read your favourite online news site, nothing is more frustrating than a web page that loads slowly.
While there may be many ways to alleviate this problem, we’re only going to discuss the most likely source of slow page-load speed for a blog; image compression and resizing.
Image Compression & Resizing
We all want our content to stand out with high-quality images, but bigger isn’t always better when it comes to imagery.
More often than not, outsourcing images that are large into small on-site placeholders result in the image being squished into the smaller container.
Now, this clash occurs while the site is being loaded, causing it to slow down drastically and thereby contributing to negative user experience (remember we mentioned that before? Full circle).
To avoid this from affecting your site, you’ll want to properly resize your image so that they are close to their container size as possible. Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to compress the image and further reduce the file size, which should double up the page speed.
The importance of decent CTAs
There is nothing worse than arriving at a web page and not knowing where to go or what to do next – especially if you’re looking at informative content.
A clear and convincing Call to Action (CTA) can help alleviate any confusions for the user and should be one of the top priorities to improve not only bounce rate, but also final conversions.
One way to ensure that they work as effectively as possible is through CTA buttons. These can be easily inputted into any content and are one of the simplest parts of a website to test.
Reduce Bounce Rate in GA with Google Tag Manager
We’ve already covered many ways to reduce the bounce rate for your site including adding more calls-to-action, improving your page speed etc.
But what happens if your content is well optimised, but the high bounce rate persists? In this case, maybe it’s time to look at the tracking implementation.
It may help to refresh our memories and go over what bounce rate really is – the percentage of single-interaction sessions on a web page, for instance, if a visitor landed on your site, did not interact with the content, and then left.
But what if a visitor landed on a very detailed, well-optimised page that answered his/her questions and left it straight after without visiting any other pages on your site? Unfortunately, this still counts as a bounce, suggesting that bounce rate doesn’t tell you whether your visitors are engaging with your content and should be modified.
To prevent the above scenario, we can change our GA default setting, and start tracking additional interactions with GTM as a page view is not the only possible interaction! By doing so you will be positively influencing your bounce rate, hence reducing it.
So there you have it, a list of actions you can take within a single working day to reduce the bounce rate on your site or blog.
Whether it’s image resizing, page load speed or mobile optimisation, there are plenty of tips you can use and help alleviate issues around bounce rate and watch as your site blossoms.