Why should a business owner even worry about reducing website bounce rates to improve stickiness? There are several reasons, however, it really depends on the site. Some sites provide specific short answers to a question posed by the reader. They will not stay long on a post or page. Other sites are providing product or service information or content that is informative. If it is well written and addresses the questions the reader is looking for, then they are likely to stay on the site for a longer period. Poorly written content or content that does not meet the needs of the reader and does not match the title will not hold readers for very long. Search engines tend to measure bounce rates and stickiness as indicators of how good a site is and will rank sites higher that have a low bounce rate!
Reducing Website Bounce Rates to Improve Stickiness
There are other indicators as well. We have listed them in no particular order as follows:
- Quality content that addresses a reader’s interest area.
- Content is relevant and useful to the searcher
- Pages load quickly and don’t leave the searcher twiddling their thumbs
- Avoid clickbait that takes the reader off to an external site
- Eliminate popups really irritate readers and may take them to another external site
- Lots of internal linking to other relevant pages keeps the reader on your site longer
- Avoid external links, but if you do make sure they are related quality sites
- High-quality content above the fold. This creates a great 1st impression and causes the reader to scroll on to the rest of the page
- Easy read, avoid making it too complicated, use short sentences, 2 or 3 sentence paragraphs, avoid the wall of text
- Mobile friendly, since the majority of readers, are now using mobile devices to surf
- Site navigation, categories, and tags, links should be clear and easy to use
- Related content can be linked-to from the current page
- Comments and popular pages are also good. People like to see what others are reading
- A clear call to action particularly if you are selling a product or service to create sales and/or calls to a salesperson
For more details about bounce rates and how they affect your time on page statistics, click here.
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