The True Cost Of High Bounce Rate And How To Make It Right
As a content marketer, you rely heavily on high readership to gain revenue and achieve your goals. Maximum readership will require that your bounce rate is as low as possible; visitors must stick and browse beyond the landing page. But what are bounce rates? How much of an impact do they have on your content marketing strategy? And how can you make it right?
Bounce rate is the number of visitors who are landing on your site and immediately leaving versus those who stick and browse further. In other words, it is the percentage of single engagement visits to your site. Google Analytics gives you real-time data and insights on-site engagements. You can also use other site features like Jetpack for example to measure the readership rate for a single day and calculate bounce rate based on the number of people reading your articles for any given day.
Impact of a High Bounce Rate
· Inconsistent traffic data. As a content marketer, getting those important leads is dependent on consistent traffic data. It must go up consistently or remain constant over specified periods. Consistency is what will keep people coming to you for content promotion campaigns. A high bounce rate will make it harder for you to pinpoint when traffic is high or when you are expected to hit rock bottom. That is devastating to whatever strategies you may have in place.
· De-ranking. Search Engines want to give the best results to searchers and ensure the top-most results are the most relevant. As such Google will closely monitor how long a visitor stays on your site when they land from a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If Google notices that people are landing on your site, spending very little time, and leaving without browsing anything else, your site could be flagged for inadequacy. You may be crafting the best headlines for content and have the best SEO strategy but your content is consistently falling short. Being pushed down the search results is disastrous for a content marketer. You need to stay up there.
· Missing out on potential conversions. Whether it’s just interacting with a visitor who will go on to share your content or generating a lead, a high bounce rate based on poor content, poor site structure, or poor site design is doom for you as a content marketer. You always need that stickiness and magnetic pull for every visitor. That is how you succeed with every piece of content that you put out.
How To Reduce A High BR
· Fast and secure load times. More often than not, visitors will come to your site and immediately leave when they sense a lack of adequate security and or a sluggish site. Slow speeds are annoying; a content marketer should know better. With regards to that, we have highly effective and affordable SSL Certificates to keep your site all year round. Our hosting packages are also made for speed and increased availability meaning your site always has that speedy load time that every content consumer craves. Explore our hosting packages that also come with excellent customer support services.
· Optimize for relevance. No one is going to stay on your site reading irrelevant content. You need to be ruthlessly precise with your content. All visitors must see the need to read an extra one or two articles whenever they visit. That engagement is what will make them stick around more and convert into loyal visitors.
· Use structured content for easy navigation and search. When visitors come to your site, they must be able to read articles A, B, and be able to search and find article C and the many others on your site. That is how the time spent on your site will increase and many will even bookmark your site and visit more frequently per day.
· Optimize for mobile. As a content marketer, the majority of your content will be accessed via mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile access means you are making it possible for hundreds of new visitors to come in and potentially convert to loyal visitors.
For you to succeed and lay a platform for continued dominance, it is important that you critically consider the above measures and minimize bounce rates as far as possible.