When running a website or blog, there are dozens of potential indicators and metrics you’ll want to keep tabs on. From your total amount of traffic each month to the speed at which your pages load, there is ample justification to care about what both visitors and search engines alike think of your brand. In the end, one measurement – bounce rate – can tell you a whole lot more about your offerings than you might realize. Additionally, reducing your bounce rate is a great way to avoid potential loss in rankings in key SERPs. Let’s review some of the best ways you can reduce those bounce rates on problem pages and get back in good graces with everybody.

Don’t Use False Advertising

Especially true when advertising products, services or offers, any blurbs, meta descriptions or other summaries of content that aren’t very true or concise may have a profound impact on bounce rates. All too often, brands try to lure people into clicking on their links and pages, without realizing that false advertising will only lead to these people clicking – and then promptly leaving. By ensuring that you’re pinging links with summaries that are accurate, you’ll avoid artificially increasing your bounce rates.

Optimize Page Speed

One of the biggest contributors to bounce rates today that isn’t directly related to content quality or relevance is page loading speed. Studies have shown that you lose 10% of your traffic for every additional second over two seconds that visitors have to wait. Especially true on mobile devices – where connections are already slower in many cases – you’ll suffer immensely if your website is taking 5 seconds or more to load. You can improve page speed by removing unnecessary plugins, optimizing multimedia, and dozens of other small tips and tricks. There is no reason why your pages should take a long time to load (unless you have picked a slow hosting provider, which is unfortunate).

Summarize Content

People naturally want high-quality, informative, detailed content. We see a direct correlation between the number of words per page and the position that page ranks in search engines. With that being said, it doesn’t mean that people want to read forever and splice through huge articles and posts to find the information they need. If you want to minimize your bounce rate, then it is imperative that you include summaries of your content in as many places as possible. This can be in social media blurbs, at the top of each page, and anywhere else where it makes sense. You can even consider pinging links to various portions in a particular piece of content much like a table of contents.

Format Content

Last but not least, you’ll want to follow the spirit of things from the above paragraph and make the content more easily skimmable. This means that you’ll want to use headers, subheaders, bolded portions for relevant and important sentences, and other formatting elements. This can make it much easier for people to read your content, find the info they need, and they’ll appreciate you making it easier for them.

Ultimately, bounce rates are unavoidable – but having high bounce rates is inexcusable. There are always methods for reducing your bounce rate. We hope the information contained above can help you in improving this metric and achieving better SEO and content-related outcomes.