What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who enter your site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within your site.
Here are 5 Ways to Bounce your Visitors From Your Website!
1) Poor Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
You don’t need to have a Degree in English to have good spelling, punctuation and grammar. There are spell checkers that you can use, along with online thesauruses (thesauri) and dictionaries. Or if you know that this isn’t your forte ask a friend or pay someone to check your work for errors. If you are typing away and you see a lot of red squiggly lines under your words, there’s a good chance they need correcting somehow.
It may just be me, but I have lost count of how many sites I have left because the writer doesn’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ and ‘they’re’ and ‘their’. I just don’t want to read those posts.
If you publish a post full of errors it does nothing for your credibility as an expert in your field.
2) Visually Misleading Site
It is well known in the web design world that you should get a good feel for what the site is about from looking at the home page. If your site is all about ‘How to build a garden shed’ and you have a picture of a cat lying by the fireside you are giving out the wrong message. You should have a picture of a garden shed being built – it’s obvious, isn’t it! Don’t confuse your reader!
3) Visually Boring Site
Humans love to look at nice images. In the Western world, we are taught to read from left to right and top to bottom and that is how our eye is trained. Place your important images (such as your logo) at the top left of your site and place further images in the direction the eye moves. Include vibrant images that are appealing or unusual so that the eye is automatically drawn to them.
Create a stunning first impression that will tempt your reader to check out a few more pages and stay on your site longer.
4) Too Busy For Business
We’ve all seen those sites – the ones with ‘Share this’, ‘Are you new here’ plugins and instructions in ten different colours and five different fonts all before you even read any content. They are enough to give you a headache!
Keep your font colours and sizes down to a minimum otherwise they become distracting. We are aiming for a pleasant experience for our readers not to beat their visual perception into submission. And make sure your content is at the top of the page not a mass of confusing text.
5) Old News
Keep your material current. Post regularly. Update old content to keep it current or delete it if it becomes irrelevant (yes I said delete it!). Your visitors want to come back to your blog to read new content. If they return that’s great but if they return and you have nothing new for them to read then you’ve lost them – they’re gone never to return.
So there are a few tips for you to drive your readers away!
I’ll cover the technical aspects of the bounce rate and what is considered to be a good one in a later post.
But for now, to quote one of my favourite bouncers…
“Time for bed”, said Zebedee.
