When people visit your website, the last thing you want them to do is clicking off immediately before they have even had a look around at other pages. You naturally want to build an audience of followers who want to read your site on a regular basis, so it’s very difficult to do this when the majority of people leave before they’ve even seen what you have to offer.
There are however 10 very simple things you can do in order to stop this from happening. If you can convince people to stick around and see your content, then it will significantly increase your chances of building a loyal following.
Improve Your Loading Speed
When people are using the internet, they want access to content immediately without having to wait. In most cases, sites are able to load in a matter of seconds. This has now become so important that if a site takes longer than around six seconds to load, then it can severely harm its bounce rate. Try compressing some aspects of your website and reducing the size of images in order to make pages load faster. Not only will this help keep visitors happy, but it also increases the chances of you being ranked higher on a search engine. It’s a simple but very effective way of improving your bounce rate drastically.
Make Your Site Easy To Navigate
If visitors are finding it very difficult to navigate around your site, then they will leave in frustration very quickly. Everything should be made very clear so then people know exactly how they can find certain pages on your site without having to spend a long time searching around. Try and have your menu at the top of the page so people can find it instantly. Also, try and promote to search option on your site so then people can find what they are looking for quickly.
Get Rid Of All Of The Clutter
While we’re on the subject of navigation, it is important that you remove any clutter you may have. If you have tons of pages that you have available in your navigation panel, then this can put many visitors off. If they find more than a few pages that could have what they’re looking for, they will not want to spend time searching through your content. If you have pages that are similar, try and combine them together. If you have an SEO strategy then this may harm things a little, but it will encourage people to stick around on your site for longer.
Delete Intrusive Adverts
There are few things quite as off-putting for people searching online than finding a website with loads of adverts that get in the way. Most people will immediately dismiss the site as being spam and quickly leave. Try and make sure that your ads are very discreet, and are well out of the way so then they are not considered to be an eyesore.
Use A Call To Action
Calls to action are very helpful when it comes to keeping people on your site. They are basically designed to invite people in and make them want to keep reading through your content. As long as you have a compelling call to action at the end of your content to try and keep your audience interested, then they should want to click on another page instead of leaving altogether.
Encourage Visitors To Interact
When people visit a website and read content, they like to feel involved. Nothing is more effective at this than encouraging people to leave comments or to ask you questions. When you do this, it opens a line of communication with your audience that can help encourage them to check out your site and become loyal visitors. It’s also a good idea to promote your social media profiles at this stage, as this is another effective way of communicating with your audience conveniently. As often as you can, try to ask your audience what they think about a subject your content covers.
Give Your Site A New Look
It could be that people are leaving your site quickly because your design is considered to be out of date. When that happens, it lowers the trust the audience has in you. They will either think your site hasn’t been updated in a while or that your website is untrustworthy. Have a look around and see if you can find a new design that best suits your site and the kind of content you create. Then you will be able to look more modern and updated whenever visitors arrive on your site.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
This is becoming more and more important. More than half of the people online are now using mobile devices to search the web, and they will not want to hang around if your desktop site takes a long time to load. Then when it does, it may not be displayed properly. Try and optimize your site for mobile use, or even create a mobile site. Just remember to include all of the same features your desktop site has, otherwise you will be missing out on a large potential audience.
Live Up To Your Claims
If you’re writing a post and you refer to it as, ”a definitive guide,” then what you’re providing had better be definitive, otherwise, people will leave unsatisfied. This can really hurt your bounce rate. Try and live up to the expectations you create in your audience’s mind. When you want to write a simple guide, make sure that it is very simple. When you are writing ”great tips” make sure the advice you give out is really helpful. As long as you are able to provide what your headings and metadata suggest, then visitors will be more interested in reading your other content.
Provide High-Quality Content
This is the most important aspect of creating a website. If you want people to be interested in your site, then your site must be interesting. In order to be interesting, your content must be of high quality. All of your content should be written well and provide a lot of helpful information. This way people will respect you and will visit your site more often. They will also share your work, and your ranking in search engine results will improve as well. All online success runs through having high-quality content. That is the most important thing to remember.
