4 SEO Strategies to reduce your WordPress Site's Bounce Rate

Nothing hurts like steady rise in your site’s bounce rate. Generally, WordPress bounce rate is a measure of the number of people who only visit a single page without looking through additional pages. It serves as a good indicator of your site’s relevance. With the help of Google Analytics, one can easily access the bounce rate statistic of his WordPress site. The ability to engage your customers and make them visit more than a single page is more likely to improve your sales. The bounce rates for most sites stands at 40.5%. Reducing this figure requires sacrifice coupled with in-depth SEO techniques as seen below.

Improve User Experience

The main aim of search engines is to provide users with relevant information. It however becomes a problem when users find problems navigating through websites to obtain that information. Continuous poor user experience hurts a site’s ranking. Luckily enough, not all is lost for WordPress sites with this problem since many things can be done to turn things around.

One way of enhancing a user’s experience is by making the site more responsive. Most people use mobile devices to access various sites. Using WordPress responsive themes minimize unnecessary scrolling and resizing of sites during access. After making necessary changes, you can use Mobile Friendly Test to note down any significant difference.

Using WordPress responsive themes

The visibility of your content works a long way in improving the experience of your users. One way of achieving this is making use of white space in breaking texts. Embrace the use of bullet points and increase the size of fonts where necessary. All these work together to ensure the visitor has an easy time reading your content. Most importantly, your WordPress site must have easy navigation points to enable readers explore your contents easily. No one wants to search the entire site for icons. Mostly used icons like the search bar should be strategically positioned within your site. To enhance visibility, try using sticky navigation bars with nicely articulated menu items.

Enhance Page Load Times

Long gone are the days when people would excuse slow page load times. Today, any website that takes more than two seconds to load receives massive bounce rates. Stepping up your game when it comes to site’s load-speed starts with testing the website’s load time. This can easily be achieved using GTmetrix or Pingdom. These tools not only provide an overview of your site’s load time but also provide substantial tips for improving the page load times.

Enhance Page Load Times

Using WordPress caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, or WP Super Cache can also help you speed up your website. Hosting service providers also play a critical role in influencing the speed of a site. That is why you need to review your hosting packages more often than not. This becomes particularly important when you have outgrown your existing hosting plan due to increased traffic. Simply find another deal to continue enjoying faster load speeds.

Content First

Have you ever asked yourself what drives people to your site? At any given time, someone visits your WordPress site to obtain certain information. Whether your site provides that information or not will be reflected in the bounce rates. To get the best outcomes, your content should have the right proportion of various keywords. Preferably, such keywords should be used in headers, sub headers, and even titles. These words should be related to the rest of the content. Otherwise, they won’t be worth it. Appropriate use of keywords not only ensures the user easily gets the most relevant information, but it also boosts your SEO campaigns in a great way.

Your content should be able to serve as a great marketing tool for you. Pop quizzes and surveys have tendencies of keeping visitors more engaged while using the site. Such pop ups should appear more often when the client is midway reading the content. Whenever possible, such features should promote your products or call for email marketing subscriptions. Before you notice it, you will be having many clients visiting more than a single page.

The need for fresh contents on more regular basis cannot be overemphasized. People love associating with latest trends. Anyone who vows to keep them updated carries the day.

Highly optimized SEO content is always an added advantage when it comes to winning this game. It is important for WordPress site owners to embrace essential plugins like Yoast SEO. With this incredible tool, one will be able to search result excerpts, change permalinks where necessary and even integration of XML sitemap. Such flawless and captivating contents keep visitors engaged. Even more, they will be encouraged to move to the next page or even click another related link.

Handle Broken Links

You don’t need to hire an SEO agency to tell you that link building plays a critical role in stepping up SEO campaigns. When effectively used, many new users will get to your site using links. You wouldn’t want your potential clients to find error messages while accessing your site through these links though. Even more, you wouldn’t like them getting error messages from internal links once they start reading through.

The first step in fixing this issue involves using plugins such as Broken Link Checker. The other alternative is W3C Link Checker, which is even better. You don’t just want to identify such links but also rectify them immediately. These incredible tools will help you achieve that purpose. What happens to the links that get broken in the middle of the night when you are dead asleep? Such links can by default be directed to the landing page. This prevents the page visitor from knowing the occurrence of any error; thereby avoiding a possibility of hitting the back button. Most importantly, you should embrace interlinking to give the visitors an idea of going beyond the single page they have landed on.

The best of you

At the end of it all, one realises that reducing bounce rates on WordPress sites is all about being the best of what you are. It’s matching quality content with amazing user experience. It is all about giving the customer every reason to stay on your site; these SEO tips will surely do that!