A high bounce rate doesn’t bode well for your site’s success. In order to prosper online, you need to drive high quality, relevant traffic to your site that converts into sales. If your bounce rate is high it can suggest that you are either attracting the wrong kind of traffic or that your site content is simply not engaging enough for customers to take further interest in what you have to offer. You may be driving large amounts of traffic to your site, but if your content is not engaging it is likely that they will not remain there long. Internet users have short attention spans; they want quick access to informative, relevant and enticing content. As a result, there are a few things to bear in mind when producing engaging content to help keep your bounce rate low.

Relevant Content – If your content is relevant to your site, industry and niche, your content is more likely to be relevant to your target market’s search terms. Whilst targeting keywords is still an important consideration, you need to think about the copy on your site as a whole as well as content on sites that are linking to you. Whilst you may not have control over site’s naturally linking to you, if your content is relevant, appropriate sites within your niche should naturally want to link to you. With this in mind, your site should rank naturally for your targeted phrases and relevant sites should be linking to you. This will help to drive relevant traffic to your site, helping to reduce your bounce rate as visitors find the kind of information they were looking for in the first place.

Digestible Information – Attracting the right traffic to your site is one thing, keeping them there is an entirely different ballgame. If your site doesn’t look like it gives users fast access to the information they need in a digestible fashion, it is likely they will look elsewhere. Ensure your homepage content is scannable so that visitors can quickly navigate to where they want to go. For the rest of the site, focus on creating short, snappy copy with headings and bullet points to break up any chunky text.

Interactive Content – Interactive content assets are a great way to keep visitor’s attention on your site. It is best to stick to one-click actions that make the user feel like they are in control. Something as simple as allowing the user to compile a wishlist or outfit creator can be hugely beneficial in getting them involved directly with your products and helping to keep them on your website for longer. Give your visitors small tasks to do and use your content to remind them of their progress when making conscious decisions or simply selecting the colour of a product.

Calls to Action – Calls to action are invaluable for keeping your visitors engaged with your site and helping to direct them to subsequent pages that may be of use to them. Something as simple and rewording your content from “we have similar products here” to “click here to see similar products” has been shown to improve click-through rates and increase the time visitors spend on a site, naturally reducing your bounce rate.

Build Trust – Your homepage needs to build trust if you want to keep your bounce rate low. Visitors need to feel confident that your site is of a high enough quality for them to stay on it. Site content and design must exude a confidence in your own knowledge of the industry.

If your site looks professional in terms of content, they will see the site as the leading authority within your niche and feel that no other site will have more to offer them, helping to reduce the chances of them pressing that back button.

Kira works for the The WebMarketing Group, an internet marketing company specialising in using effective SEO techniques and content strategies to drive quality traffic to sites and keep it there.