I know the pain of loosing visitors instantly after visiting your blog, I know How it feels whenever the visitor do not interact with your site. Although you may have used various techniques to engage your visitor by aiming to reduce bounce rate, but however, due to some reason your site may still have a huge percentage of bounce rate in your Google analytics stats.

An Increasing number of bounce rate not only hampers your blog traffic conversion rate, it will also hamper the SEO of your website. I will further explain how the increasing bounce rate can hamper your site SEO in the next section below, but the main aim of this post is to guide you through each and every step that are essential to lower the bounce rate on your website.

See SEO Guide

• Why you should avoid buying backlinks

As I have mentioned in the title of this post, it is a complete case study and the tips I am going to provide here is based on my personal experience. May be you can’t find the same bounce rate reduction tips in other blog, but I am sure that these strategies will perfectly going to work for you.

Before getting started with the bounce rate reduction tips lets have a quick intro on what really a bounce rate is:

Bounce rate is the percentage of the visitors who left your website without interacting and  instantly after visiting your website. Numbers of reason are responsible for high bounce rate. A user might leave your site within the few seconds if he can’t find the useful information as well as your site design and  usability issue are the main cause for high bounce rate.

See: Design an optimized 404 error page.

How Increasing Bounce rate can affect your site SEO?

Whenever the visitor search for his query, Google will try to display the most relevant result, but when he left your site within a few minutes or again when he search for the same query Google thinks that your post is not relevant to the keyword that the user is searching for and it may decrease your ranking in the search result. So, guys this is the main reason why you should reduce bounce rate and the reason why you should engage your visitor within your blog.

See: SEO tips and tricks for beginners

Tips to Reduce Bounce rate from your Google analytics stats

As you can see in the above picture that I have reduced my bounce rate from 90% to below 10% within 1 month. Before December 2014, my bounce rate was more than 90%,  which means that 90% of visitors are leaving my blog without interacting with my content. When my bounce rate was decreased, I noticed that my blog post sharing and comments is increased by 200% and now my earning is also doubled. So, guys here in this post I will show you 7 secret tips to reduce bounce rate from your Google analytics stats.

These are the list of 7 secret tips to reduce bounce rate.

#1. Avoid using annoying Ads, pop ups and Blockers

Few months back  I was using Infolinks ads on my blog and if you have ever used Infolinks, you may have noticed that they offer 4 different types of ad categories and these ads pops up whenever the user visits your site. Even though Infolinks is offering a great way to monetize your blog, but in some of the cases, these types of ads are also the main cause of high bounce rate. The visitors may find annoying and embarrassing whenever they sees these types of ads and pop ups and therefore you should try the banner or text ads like Adsense and Chitika are providing.

After few months of using Infolinks I removed all of the ads from my blog and within 2 days of removing the ads my bounce rate was reduced by 20 percent.

Another point to consider is the blockers, I have seen some of the website are using the blockers for those visitors who are using an ad block. I do appreciate with this strategy because using an ad block is like eating something in restaurant without paying the bill, but guys being rude to your visitor may discourage them to revisit your blog and they may instantly leave your blog with our interacting therefore instead of blocking visitors you can show alternate content to them. For example, showing a banner with a request to white list your blog in adblock.

As you can see that Amit Agarawal, the owner of labnol.org is showing alternate banner instead of ads. Here he is requesting his visitors to whitelist his blog in a polite way and after seeing this I think the genuine reader will probably whitelist list his blog. Therefore guys instead of being rude to your visitors be polite because politeness is the inexpensive way to make friends.

#2. Easy Navigation and Breadcrumbs

What if there are hundreds of useful contents in your blog and there is no any proper way to access those links from your homepage. Guys, if you have a blog without any proper navigation, then the time has arrived to modify your design because if there is no any proper way that guides your visitors to navigate through different pages and posts, it will obviously increase your bounce rate.

So, While designing your blog or choosing a WordPress theme, visit your website like a visitor not as a developer. You will obviously know that where your content and the links to the posts are located, but remember does your visitors can really find those links easily?

While visiting your blog ask a few questions to yourself,  Does the navigation and your blog post are easily accessible? Do the banners and ads are hiding your navigation links? Guys these are some of the few points that you need to consider while creating your blog and if you haven’t then do check your blog and evaluate if your links are easily accessible or not.

#3.  Increase your website load time

Let’s take a scenario, think that you are searching for the list of 10 best cheap web hosting providers in Google. Luckily you found my blog post on top result, I am sure that you will click on that result to visit my blog. So, what if my blog takes longer time to load and to show the contents that you want to read. I am sure that most of the visitors will click on the back button and will obviously go to another result displayed by Google.

So, guys your website load time is the another main cause of the high bounce rate, therefore in order to reduce bounce rate your website must be faster and to boost your website speed you can try caching plugins, CDN like cloudflare or MaxCDN, and if you are facing the issues with your hosting provider, then you can migrate to the other reliable web hosting provider.

#4. Using Zero bounce plugin to reduce bounce rate

The main reason for the high bounce rate is the back button of the browser which the user will usually press when then want to leave your site, but what if you can force your visitor to visit your site further. Yes, the plugin called Zero bounce rate plugin made it possible by redirecting visitors to your desired URL. You can find more detail about this plugin in the video embedded below.

#5. Use New tab for external links

As you can see here in this post I have added an external link to labnol.org, guys think what would have happened if that link doesn’t open in new tab. I know that visitors may come back to my blog by pressing the back button, but guys sometime you may lose your visitor permanently.
Therefore, whenever you are planning to add any external links in your blog post always remember that the link is opening in new tab because opening external links to new tab is the great way to reduce bounce rate.

Ways to add external links

Link will open in same tab

<a href=”http://www.itdigitalworld.com” target=”_self”>

Link will open in new tab

<a href=”http://www.itdigitalworld.com” target=”_blank”>

#6. Write Quality content

I am sure you may have heard that your first impression is the last impression. The same principle applies to your visitors, I mean whenever your visitor land to your website from any medium (Search engines, social sites or referral) they must get attracted by the content you have written. Whenever your visitor like your first article he will probably explore your site further to find more useful stuffs.

#7. Interlink your Posts

As you go on writing, no one will find your old blog posts. Interlinking your blog post means providing more visibility to your contents. Whenever your posts are interlinked with each other, visitors will probably click on the link that they may find useful and I am sure that it will also help you to reduce bounce rate by more than 30 percent.

Guys, these are some of the bounce rate reduction tips that I have used to reduce bounce rate from my blog and I hope this post is going help you to reduce your bounce rate. So, guys if you like this post do share with your friends and if you have any other tips to reduce bounce rate then please mention it in the comment below.