Getting a lot of traffic to your website is not as important as keeping that traffic on your website for a decent amount of time. If you’re bounce rate is high, then your website may not be promoting your brand in an effective way. If you do not know what a bounce rate is, your bounce rate is how quickly a visitor leaves your site. Which is definitely something that is worth taking the time to prevent!
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You can find out what your bounce rate is through Google Analytics, which is a free tool that any blogger + biz owner can use to track tons of statistics like how their website is performing in different aspects. Another feature that Google Analytics provides is the pages per session feature that tells you how many pages a visitor goes to while on your site during a “session” or visit. Both of these statistics can tell you a lot about how your traffic is interacting with your site and may prompt you to change a few things in order to increase engagement.
1 | INTERNAL LINKS WITHIN YOUR BLOG POSTS
This is not only incredible for SEO purposes, which if you are interested in SEO I wrote about 16 SEO tricks here that could help out your blog or biz it is incredible for keeping people on your site longer. If they happen to stumble upon your site in the first place they are most likely interested in the topic you blog about. You might as well drop a few links so they can go discover more of your awesome thoughts on different topics! By doing this, it increases their chances of becoming a faithful follower and they can decide whether or not your blog content is something they are interested in becoming a fan of.
2 | CATEGORIES + TAGS
Categories and tags can help users that are on your site pick out a topic they want to read about. For example, I have the categories of: blog tips, entrepreneur life, studio work, etc. I am passionate about all of these topics! You can display each category on your blog sidebar as well which also gives people more of an opportunity to interact with the categories you have. I am a firm believer in promoting old blog posts because I put so much work into each post, it somewhat sickens me to think I work so hard just for that post to get noticed for one week! I want the span of my “blog post life” to never end or at least be over an extended period of time.
3 | SIMILAR POSTS AT BOTTOM OF EACH BLOG POST
There are some awesome plugins for this if you are using self-hosted WordPress. I love using the related post plugin which is free and easy to customize with code! Keeping similar posts toward the bottom of your blogs keeps people on your website longer because they don’t want to leave if you are putting amazing content right in front of them!
4 | HAVE CATEGORIES OR RECENT POSTS DISPLAYED IN SIDEBAR
I mentioned this in the second point but having categories sometimes isn’t enough. Make these categories easily accessible to your readers by linking the category pages in your navigation bar and/or sidebar. By doing this, you are putting an easy solution right in front of them. For example, if someone came to my website to look for all my blog posts on business tips I have that category on my sidebar so they can go to that archive page! This is something your readers will appreciate.
5 | ALWAYS CLICK THE “NEW TAB” OPTION
Whenever you link something within a blog post or use an external link, there is usually an option that you can choose whether the new link opens in a new tab when clicked or not. The user then has two tabs open instead of just one where the new link that leads to another site didn’t replace yours. This is important because most people do not exit out of their original tabs, keeping your tab open for a longer period of time so that they can eventually make their way back to your site.
You see the “open link in a new tab” option? That needs to be checked! Once this box is checked your link will then be opened in another tab! I have found this trick helpful with my site but also when I am visiting other sites as well.
Is there something you do that lowers your bounce rate? Tell me about it in the comments below!
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