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| Enhancing User Experince and Reducing Bounce Rate of Your Blog Posted: 22 Dec 2013 03:00 AM PST  Your are busy looking in any way to increase your blog traffic for your sponsors and advertisement. Posting and sharing to social media is a clever way to get readers, there maybe hundreds and thousands of people that will click on your link, but when they arrive at your site it loads very slow, the designs are intolerable and the fonts are hardly ever seen. They will start to click the exit button, then your effort trying to divert them to your blog is nonsense. Do you ever think of having some furnish on your site? try to read some tips below. What is Bounce Rate? The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your homepage is boring or off-putting How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate Reducing the bounce rate on pages that have the highest volume of traffic from your highest converting sources means more engaged visitors and a greater chance of conversion. What follows is a list of 20 considerations for reducing your bounce rate. These are by no means absolutes and are relative to everyone's unique value propositions and audience, but generally speaking, these are worth thinking about. 1. Poor Design is Increasingly Less Tolerable Pop-up ads annoy people. In some rare cases they offer something worth the roadblock, but usually they disrupt the user experience. Read: Text Lightning design for blogs 2. Use Intuitive Navigation for Important Items Don't make your visitors feel dumb (or think you're dumb) for not providing them with clear and obvious paths to get the content they may be looking for. The most common reaction to not being able to find something that should be obvious is frustration – and if you've ever been on a web page where you can't figure out how or where to navigate, this is exactly how you feel. Heatmaps are a great way to gain visibility into where user's might be trying to click, giving you insight into what should be clickable. A great tool for this is Crazy Egg. 3.You Should Probably Avoid Pop-ups I'm not just talking about gradients and drop shadows; design now transcends the whole user experience. Your content needs to be attractive; both in terms of graphical treatments and readability. Design for your target audience, which may not necessarily be the audience you already have, or at least not the majority of it. Design has become a legitimacy signal and the lack thereof can directly impact visitors (and prospects) perceptions of the quality of your business and services. Read: Facebook pop up with timer to reduce bounce rate 4. Speed This pretty much goes without saying these days but nothing really effects bounce rate like having a web page that takes 10 seconds to load. Not only is this a confirmed ranking factor and lends directly to user experience, but it can cause your follower reach to stall, negatively impact your search rankings, and destroy your conversion rate. 5. Is Your Website Mobile Usable I realize that is far from proper English, but I feel it makes my point. Being mobile friendly is ideal, but being mobile usable is critical. Websites can still be effective as long as content can be accessed and used from a mobile device or tablet. Furthermore, mobile usability does not necessarily mean from a design compatibility and accessibility standpoint, in many cases it means is the language on your site simple and clear enough that people on the go (on mobile devices) can still make sense of what they need to do to find information and at the very least contact you if necessary. 6. Design Information Around Priorities This comes back to the last consideration, are your target conversion or content points clearly presented on your pages? Can users immediately get a sense of what they should expect to find or are expected to do while on the page? Websites tends to have two paths to conversion: Landing pages (short direct sales path) A conversion funnel (longer process of qualifying visitors through a collection of pages that drive toward conversion) Are you effectively managing the expectations of your visitors? A good litmus test for this is if you are able to trigger your primary page conversions more than 20 percent of the time. Read: How to increase organic traffic in simple ways 7. Segment Information This is another perspective on creating content that is designed to be digested and consumed. Readability is important here but so is the idea of grouping content into segments or categories – this is most often seen in blog posts where header tags are used to break apart large walls of text. Read: Full designs in Label widgets for blogs 8. Optimize For Intent This is a more detailed take on information design, and ensuring that based on the keywords your visitors are using to get to your pages, you are serving them an experience that address their expectations. This is often talked about in paid search and display advertising, where the highest bounce rates are created from advertisers not closing the loop between the ad copy and the landing page copy and design. The experience needs to be consistent from start to finish or you risk breaking the user's intent loop. 9. Be Mindful of Ad Placement This is still a bit of a new idea (especially to advertisers) but if possible avoid the standard ad units. Not only have web users developed ad blindness but Google has also started penalizing pages that have too many ad units above the fold, and hint: they are looking for standard ad unit sizes. Furthermore, from a publisher perspective, I can understand it's great to squeeze an extra handful of impressions in per pageview, but if you look at some of the high performing niche ad networks, you will notice there publisher websites have a general lack of intrusive ads. Read: Float ads or widgets on side of blogs How to add 3 column footer (extra ad space for blogs) 10. Lazy Load Third Party Content Lazy loading, in case you're unfamiliar, is a design pattern process for deferring the loading of objects until they are needed. Mashable is a fantastic example of this in action, notice how their pages load almost instantly and then new content is loaded as it is needed (as your scroll position advances toward those pixels). Read: How to add lazy load script to your blogs This is done both for speed and user experience, and can be specified programmatically on a component by component basis. 11. Color Contrast Readers need contrast. Contrast between colors can make a dull story into an exciting one and conversely can turn the most exciting content in the world into a palette of indiscernible whites and grays if not given proper consideration. Contrast is important to consider as the web moves faster towards different mediums of content, with more and more happening on the pages, it is important to use colors and patterns to draw your reader's eyes toward the important parts of the page. Read: Color code generator for blogs 12. Messaging is Blatantly Obvious This is another consideration when it comes to focus and attention. Remember you only have a few seconds to translate value to a new visitor, so don't make them guess. Taglines are a great way to quickly translate purpose, but if you don't have one another simple way is to place your site's purpose in plain text in an obvious place (like the header or the top of the sidebar). If you sell something, say that. 13. Cut Out Distractions I wish I could say this goes without saying, but I still run into website on a weekly basis that autoplay audio and video. These are distractions and intrusions that aren't expected and break the experience. Cutting out distractions not only leads to better bounce rates, but usually dramatically increases your conversion rates. 14. Offer Related Content Based on Personas If you don't offer related content on your pages, or intuitive navigation (hopefully with some sort of hook or teaser) then you're missing out on a substantial number of pageviews and the opportunity to be more of a sticky resource. Related content gets really powerful when you're able to target it within the same categories or tags, as these segments of content tend to be attractive to visitors who make it through related posts in the same content stack. Read: Full design and Fast loading related post for blogs 15. Leverage Internal Search If you don't currently offer search functionality on your website or if you don't regularly review internal search analytics, then you're missing the boat. Web users have become so used to search that it is an easy behavioral pattern to accommodate and leverage for improved experience. To take this a step further, you can use newer tools for crowdsourced FAQs to literally create a content roadmap for what matters most to your audience. 16. Open External Links in New Windows This is an incredibly simple concept that is still often overlooked, but if you're going to link out to a resource on your website, make sure you have it open a new window instead of redirecting the user off your site. The best (and easiest way) to do this is to simply add target="_blank" into the link's < a> tag. So for example; < a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">anchor text < /a>. 17. Prominently Display Your Search Box This is a separate consideration from leverage internal search that has more to do with number 2 on this list; if you are going to offer helpful functionality like site search on your website, don't make users have to search for your search box. 18. Offer a Helpful 404 Page Nobody likes to think of instances where their website or pages may greet users with a 404 page, but these things happen. The best thing you can do to turn a negative experience into a potentially positive one is a few things: Use Google's suggestive snippet for creating useful 404 pages. Visit the "Enhance 404 pages" section in Google Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. Add a search box and a link to the homepage If nothing else, add a bit of design and humor. 19. Keep it Readable This isn't a duplicate of number 3. In this consideration I'm talking specifically about your page's Flesch-Kincaid score, or the level of difficulty for comprehension of your content. There are two tests used to determine both the ease of reading and the average grade-level required for comprehension. Both of which have been baked into a very helpful index calculator. 20. Split Up Long Posts People have shorter attention spans than ever before. So when they see long posts they are immediately reminded of times in high school trudging through massive texts of traditional English literature. Consider instead splitting these up either into separate posts in a series or adding pagination to break up the content into smaller and more digestible chunks. This New York Times piece does a fantastic job (with an absolutely incredible story) of consolidating their story into chapters and breaking up a substantial and engaging experience across several views and interactions.  |
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