How to Reduce Bounce Rate?

My bounce rate is already higher up to 75% but it was even higher up to 85% but I reduced by using some of tricks. Now I am working on to lower it up to 60%.  Bounce rate is common problem for most of bloggers. If you are an old blogger and getting good traffic from search engines and your blog also has good rank then it is not easy to reduce your bounce rate. However you can reduce it.

Blogs are different than static websites because blogs are mostly content rich. So there are different tricks for reducing bounce rate for blogs and websites. In this post I am discussing to reduce blogs bounce rate.

What is bounce rate?
If a visitor comes to your website or on a post form search engine or ore from somewhere and he leaves your site from that page and does not care to read other posts or he does not care to click on other links of your site it will be called bounce.
If in a day 1000 visitors came to your blog and 900 of them left your site form landing page or entrance page then your bounce rate is 90%.

How to know your bounce rate?
To reduce your bounce rate you have to find out what is the current bounce rate of your website.
I use Alexa and Google Analytics for checking my bounce rate. According to Alexa my bounce rate is 65% but according to Google Analytics my bounce rate is 75%.

Find out the reason of higher bounce rate
some times you will find it is almost impossible to reduce your bounce rate as for me. My blog is good enough and getting over 80% traffic from search engines. I have written some of posts that are not in my niche but those posts are ranking very well and getting almost 60% of overall traffic. But it is hard to convince those visitors to read my other good posts. The only way to reduce this bounce rate is to remove those posts but if I do it I will lose 60% of my search engine traffic and I will never do that.

What I am doing for it?
I am writing more good posts that can be ranked higher in my niche. So other posts also will get good traffic and my bounce rate will be lowered.

Is your website Slow?
If it is slow you may make it fast. Because studies say if a website takes more than 8 seconds to load visitor left it. So you your website will have a high bounce rate.
You can read my post to make your website faster.
5 Tips to Speed up WordPress Blog

Is your blog user-friendly?
If it is not may try to make it. A user-friendly blog contains everything you need to make a good blog design.
Read related post
8 Elements of a user Friendly WordPress Blog

Are you a whole seller or retailer?
If you write on a specific subject or you write on one or two subject as online money making and blogging then you are a whole seller. If you are working on multiple niches as blogging, money making, marketing, social media, technology, software etc then you are retailer. For retailers normally bounce rate will be high. I also have this problem when I started my blog I could not maintain my blog on a specific niche so now it is like Indian Khichadi (mush). I am trying to manage blogging, social media and technology in my blog.

How useful are your landing pages?
Actually usability can have different meaning for person to person but I think a useful article is always use and useless article is always useless. If an article seems useful to a visitor he may read your other article also this way he will help you to reduce your bounce rate.

Do you write for search engines or humans?
If you write for search engines you should be getting good traffic from search engines on your individual posts and there will be a little direct traffic so your blog should be having high bounce rate so if you change your mind and try to write for humans this will help you to reduce your bounce rate.

Do you promote your posts or not?
If you depend only on search engines for visitors then your bounce rate will be higher because there is no human support. Search engine visitors are different you should not compare them with direct visitors, I have some of my fav  blogs and visit them regularly to check for new posts and some I have subscribed in Google reader. But only those blogs are enough and useful for me. Other good are also in existence but I visit them only via search engines. So to get visitors leaving comments on other blogs and submitting your posts in social bookmarking sites will help you to reduce your bounce rate.

Do you provide choice or not to your visitors?
If a visitor comes to one of your posts he should be feel friendly there he should not he has been left in a jungle. So your bog should be having tags, categories, recent posts, related posts etc on a single page. It is good idea to please a reader to read other articles or visit other pages.

Do you have navigation or not?
Actually all (mostly) the blogs have navigation but navigation should be clearly visible easy identifiable, navigation can contain top categories and tags.

Are you a coder or designer?
A blogger should be both if you are a coder you will create ugly outputs and if you are a designer you will create only beautiful designs. So you should be a coder from inside and a designer from outside.

Image Credit: Baby Freebies