In a world of impatient clickers, most people will expect any web page to load within the first two seconds, according to an article on the Entrepreneur. Sadly, 40% of your visitors are likely to leave your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. If this is the situation for your website, then you are bound to have a high bounce rate. The bounce rate of your website is a measure of the quality of visits from every visitor who interacts with your site.

It is determined by calculating the frequency at which visitors visit your website and leave from the same page they came in through, barely interacting with the content in your site. Sadly, the higher the bounce rate, the lower you will rank in the different SERPs. Simply put, having a high bounce rate signifies that your site isn’t as fulfilling enough to your visitors as you might need it to be. The trick lies in tweaking the intricate details of the site to improve its appeal.

Here is how to improve your ranking by reducing your bounce rates:

Content Readability Is a Necessity

Quality content is borderline worthless without enough readability. When writing for an online audience, any long and endless paragraphs will scare them from even getting into the nitty-gritty details of your content. Most will leave as soon as they enter your website leading to a high bounce rate.

Ideally, readers desire to read through scannable and readable content. Provide them this by making your content scannable through including subheadings as well as bolding them. You also need to avoid using too lengthy paragraphs and instead break them into short one, sometimes breaking a paragraph into two when needed. Other tips for improving readability include:

• Adding images and graphs into your content
• Bolding keywords (though this shouldn’t be overdone)
• Using questions, whether rhetoric or not, to evoke the involvement of your readers

Use a Strong Internal Link Structure

Internal links reduce the bounce rates of your site as they promote more interaction between the audience and your content. However, internal linking is not just about adding as many links as possible. If you happen to do this, the chances are that you will ruin the user experience when reading through your site. Relevance in internal linking is key.

The internal links that you provide need to augur well with the content in the page you are linking to. Additionally, you should ensure all links are active to avoid exposing your visitors to error 404 pages. If any links are broken, conduct an SEO audit and invest in broken

link building. Link placement is also vital. Hyperlink the content to contextual anchor texts to avoid forcing your readers to guess what lies behind the link.

Be Prudent With the Use of CTAs

At the end of reading your content or interacting with your page, users ought to easily identify the key takeaway you desire them to make from your content. A simple call to action would suffice. The problem is that most people expose their readers to information overload by including a variety of call to actions on their page.

While the idea is that visitors will choose the call to action that resonates with their needs, most will leave the site without interacting with it much. Not only does this increase your bounce rates, but it also hurts your conversion rates. When formulating your call to actions, incorporate a minimal number of CTAs. They should also be quite clear in directing your readers on what to do next.

Improve Your Site Speed

Sometimes the issue will lie in that readers can barely get a single page to load on your website. Given the competitive nature of the blogosphere, most will look for alternative sites to get their content or even buy their items. While your website might be fast on desktops, it might be slow on mobile phones.

Therefore, when using an SEO tool to optimize speed, it is wise to test for both mobile phones and desktops. Overall, you will need to ensure that your site is mobile friendly in terms of speed, page layout, and font size flexibility. Luckily, you can test this through Google’s mobile-friendly test. The faster your site, the more comfortable people will be while using it, which reduces bounce rates.

Optimize Your Metadata Descriptions

In some situations, visitors might feel misled to visiting your page by the different search engines. Once they notice that your site’s content doesn’t match their expectations, they will leave immediately. This situation can best be solved by optimizing your metadata descriptions. Simply put, these descriptions help to give the potential visitor a snippet of what your page contains.

Write metadata descriptions that are relevant to your web content. However, remember to include the relevant information within the 155 character limit since Google will replace anything past this number with an ellipsis. Great metadata descriptions should at least include a relevant keyword and a call to action.

Target the Right Visitor

Your site’s content should only be considered as quality as long as it is targeted to the right audience. Otherwise, visitors will find their way to your site and leave almost immediately. As such, commit to market research and create a persona of your potential visitor to learn what makes them tick. By posting content that addresses their pain points, you will have a higher chance of reaching out to the right individuals.

On the other hand, you ought to also concentrate on factors such as where your traffic is coming from. If your link building strategy involves using guest posting, ensure that the content you have posted on other sites uses relevant links to your site. This will reduce the chances of a visitor visiting your site only to leave due to the content being irrelevant. In a nutshell, ensure that both on-page and off-page SEO strategies are aimed at providing value to your visitors.

Site visitors expect nothing short of valuable content represented in a clear and appealing manner. The closer you can get to this, the lower your bounce rates will become. Even better, reduced bounce rates improve audience engagement and conversion rates. Tweak your site accordingly to improve your rank on the different search engines.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com
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