Are you looking for ways to decrease your website bounce rate and get super audience retention for your site?

This article will discuss just that.

For every brand whose advertising model is engagement-based, their goal is to find a way to make you spend more time on their sites.

YouTube is doing it, Facebook, Twitter, and all the social media networking sites are into this marketing model.

Ecommerce platforms and smaller brands are into this advertising model too.

It happens to be the best a business can ever venture into, and this isn’t a thing of social media platforms only.

Your blog and website should be driven in that aspect, i.e., to make people spend more time on your website.

The thing is that the more you can have your website visitors stay longer, the more they’ll be able to consume as much of your content as they could and eventually turn into leads.

As bloggers and webmasters, we are most familiar with this model differently: “bounce rate.”

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who come into one’s site without proceeding to take any further action and jump out or exit the site.

For every site visitor that suddenly bounces out of your site in this manner, it means they haven’t given you enough opportunity to get them converted to leads.

Bounce rate is a vital metric that tells search engines if it was a mistake to include your site in search results in response to their user search queries.

If it were indeed a mistake, your site appearance on SERPs would drop for that search phrase, which means a decline in traffic.

Therefore, it is essential that while looking for ways to improve your site viewers, you’re also looking for ways to retain them on your site for longer.

What is the Standard Bounce Rate?

Just like in the case of website speed, bounce rate varies with a site’s niche.

From what we have gathered from its definition, bounce rate is rated in percentage.

Going by Rocket Fuel, any bounce rate from; 26-40% is excellent, 41-55% is average, 56-70% is above average, which may/may not raise a red flag, but any bounce rate above 70% is worrying.

How to Calculate Bounce Rate

There’s a simple formula for this, and here you go;

No of total page sessions/No of total page entrances= bounce rate

Now that you understand why making people stay on your site longer is essential let’s see how you can make people spend time consuming your content.

Our target must be the 15-second rule.

The 15-second rule states that you have done a great job to hook your site visitors to stay at least 15 seconds on your site.

Mind you, the goal is 15 seconds.

Without further ado, below are the ways to make people stay longer on your site.

1. Make Your Site Responsive to Mobile

Statistics show that 52.2% of website traffic on the Internet now comes from mobile devices.

If we put this in perspective, it’ll show that about 52% of your potential traffic is mobile device users, including tablets and phones.

This indicates that by not having a mobile-friendly website, there’s a massive chance that you lose your potential mobile audience.

However, you’ll, of course, be able to secure some, but when they come to your site on their mobile devices and experience challenges navigating through it, they have no option but to give up.
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If this happens more often, you lose a lot of traffic and increase your bounce rate.

Therefore, it is essential that whichever theme you have on your site, it must give visitors on mobile a resounding view on their devices.

2. Make Your Site Stand Out

The Internet creates tens of thousands of websites every day, and in your niche, there may be hundreds to thousands of others out there.

Until you give people the reasons why they must choose your site over that of your competition, then you can not win them over and earn their loyalty as well.

There are several ways to go by this, and one of the ways is by standing out.

Standing out in your niche means many things, but it simply entails giving your audience an experience they won’t get anywhere else.

It can be in the way you engage with them, your site appearance, the value you offer, and your method of approach, in addition to many.

3. Have a Call to Action

Having CTAs on your site is a no-brainer, and when it comes to their usefulness, they are just superb.

Action must be a tool to get people to subscribe to your email list or purchase that bestselling eBook on your site.

For instance, a user made a search query on Google and, from there, landed on your site, hoping to get value.

Fortunately, they got the right thing they were looking for, so read your blog post to the end.

Suddenly, you’ve got a call to action that hooks them up; maybe you’re recommending another similar topic or giving a freebie.

Instead of exiting your site, the visitor keeps navigating and reading through, and upon meeting some compelling topics, they get converted into a lead.

An increase in audience retention rate is just a part of the things you can achieve with this.

4. Improve Your Website Speed

Have you ever considered running a website page load time or speed test?

Well, your website speed is another critical metric that, if it is wrong, results in countless losses of traffic.

It also contributes significantly to the increase in the bounce rate.

Most users will leave your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.

To prevent your page load time from influencing your blog traffic in a disadvantageous way, you need to optimize the speed of your site.

Several things can affect the speed of your site.

However, there are different methods to employ a fix.

Your first step is to make a web speed test with tools like Google page insights and Pingdom speed test to identify if your site page load time is alright.

If it is not, you should deploy a fix.

5. Add Internal Links

Similar to a call to action, adding internal links is a great way to increase blog traffic or audience retention.

Internal Links are powerful because they appear within the content.

Even when a visitor is planning to bounce off of your site after reading few paragraphs, it can be challenging.

The clickable links within your blog post map to another content and grab the visitor’s attention and have them click to find more.

Instead of quitting the page, they’re being lied to a different page where they’ll find more value, and from there, they keep spending more time on your site than anticipated.

6. Add Visuals

Visuals also play a vital role in helping you increase blog traffic retention.

When I’m about to write this, I remember one of my old habits.

Instead of reading the blocks of content on a blog post, I navigate right to the images of the past, thinking I’ll have a grasp of the entire content.

That was back then, but I still consume a lot of my time watching images rather than reading the text.

This seems awkward, and of course, it is.

Considering the real potential of images in content marketing, they are things no marketer will love to get their audience hooked up to.

Take, for example, adding infographics in your blog post.

I guess people will love to glimpse what it entails and take some time to grasp it fully.

The fact is that images promote your content and its readability and flow.

Adding visuals will pay its dividend by making users stay longer than they should on your site, which means more potential for conversion.

7. Meet You Readers Expectation

Here’s another means to bolster up the audience retention rate of your site and increase your bounce rate.

For every single user on your site, they’re expecting to get some value from you.

That’s why they landed themselves on it.

What entices them to come by must not be in any way be overlooked.

It would help if you tried in any way possible to try to meet their expectations through the content you put forward.

For instance, someone learned about one of your blog posts, which states a solution to conditions like obesity.

When they click on your blog, the chances are that they expect to see a practical solution or product they could use to get back in shape.

So, it would help if you didn’t violate this expectation by talking about something irrelevant.

Clickbait titles are eye-catchy, but because they don’t usually deliver promises, they end up frustrating users and make them bounce out of sight as soon as they can.

This way, you’re not only destroying your audience retention but also breaking user trust.

With that said, there are uncountable ways to make your titles sound compelling without being deceptive or using clickbait.

8. Increase Content Readability

Here’s another goldmine when it comes to the need to increase blog traffic retention.

Writing blog posts isn’t just about writing to create value.

This is the primary focus of content creation, but you need to ensure your readers are comfortable reading what you have in place.

Reading can be tedious, and besides, there are millions of blog posts one can read on the Internet, so why would they stick to yours?

You can answer this question with the value you’re adding to society and people’s comfort when reading your content.

A great way to improve your content readability score is by eliminating grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, wrong punctuations, and more.

You can do some things to improve content readability scores.

For example, you must break the content into smaller paragraphs, stick to the topic, take the readers along by engaging, show your determination to provide solutions, and more.

9. Make a Great First Impression

Here comes the famous quote that “the first impression is the last impression.”

Have you ever been to the hospital and be skeptical about whether the doctor in front of you is qualified to handle your condition?

Their appearances and dresses would matter a lot, I think.

I was reading about some facts the other day and found out that the Lab coats the doctors wear are a symbol that expresses professionalism and confidence to patients.

Without being impressed at sight, there’s a great potential that people will lose confidence in what they see you doing.

Such a scenario takes a similar dimension to your blog.

You have to give your audience that first impression right before they come to your site and when they do.

So, you might be wondering how to give the first significant impression.

Below are some helpful tips on that.

• If users come across you spamming your links over the internet floor, it gives them a wrong impression of you. This is why you need to bring value before adding your links to any site.
• A professional blog design speaks a lot about your site to prospects.
• A substantial social following gives users enough confidence.
• Appearing on Google’s top search results also increases your credibility.

These and more can influence how the audience looks at your site and directly affect their time on your site.

Final Thoughts

Getting users to spend more time on your site is crucial and only second to traffic to your site.

There you go, nine ways to make people stay on your site longer.

I want to share a bonus tip.

Let it be embedded in your mind that your goal is to bring traffic and retain them longer on your site.

If this perspective drives you, every strategy you put in place will reflect that, and hopefully, you’ll attain your goals with time.

Which other thing do you think could make someone stay longer on your site and reduce your site’s bounce rate?