Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Written by: Gary Horsman

Reducing Your Bounce Rate

It’s All About The Experience

Provide someone with an outstanding experience and they will only want more. When someone visits your website or blog they are there to have a rewarding experience. They will want to learn something, be entertained and have the experience easy and trouble-free.

Your blog posts need to have delightful images and graphics. You need captivating headlines. Provide easy-to-scan materials and links to deeper content if they so desire to learn or experience more. This deeper content or providing it to the reader is an important step in reducing bounce rate. Provide links to other materials and if these links are used then the bounce rate goes to zero for that visitor.

When you write a blog post think about writing for a single visitor. Visualize this visitor. Do all that you can to make the experience special for that visitor. If you think of ways to engage each individual website or blog visitor and are successful then you bounce rate will become zero. This is – after all – your ultimate objective.

With each visitor, you have a chance to reduce your bounce rate. Make the most of it for each and every visitor.

Individual Words Matter

A good wordsmith does not just use proper grammar and spelling. It is much more than this. The psychology of the words and the psychology of the context is very important. What are the desires of your visitors? What is important to them? Can you engage in ways that are important to them and they did not even realize themselves how important it was? If you can tap into desires they did not know they had then you are engaging at a very deep level.

Knowing Your Visitor – Know Your Audience

You get to learn a great deal about your audience by offering them something. They measure whether they liked it or they didn’t.

You could try to obtain the same information by using focus groups. However, it’s hard to design content or products or service by using focus groups. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Once you start offering something you will start to learn. You will get feedback and learn more. Your goal should be to know so much about your audience you know their needs, passions, and desires instinctively. Get to a point where you know what to create for them beyond their own ability to imagine what they want.

Whatever your level of creativity and your ability to innovate, there is no substitute for an in-depth knowledge of your customers. The better you can know, understand, intuit, and anticipate their desires, the better ability you will have to engage them.

Simple is Better

Simplicity – it’s a beautiful thing. Focus on simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple for people to understand.

Science and research corroborate this statement. Cognitive fluency suggests that simplicity is what the brain craves and responds to.

This is especially true in engagement optimization. The science and research says that simple websites are better.

Better in what way? They engage and convert better.

The human mind has a remarkable ability to perceive beauty, ease of use, and functionality. The instant in which this happens is the instant in which a customer decides to continue or not.

Bounce Rate Reduction – Conclusion

To increase engagement with a corresponding reduction in bounce rate focus on these 4 items:

• Focus on the visitor experience
• Select your words with care and create superior headlines
• Know your visitors better than they know themselves
• Simplify

To learn more about Content Marketing we have created a full tutorial course. Here is a link to the Content Marketing Introduction.

A Valuable Article on Bounce Rate

I recently found this very interesting article with the title “What is a Good Bounce Rate“. It was written by the founder of Siteoscope – Itamar Gero. Siteoscope offers some excellent tracking tools that will help you to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing, SEO, and SERP (search engine results pages) performance.