How to ensure your blogs engage users to reduce your bounce rate

Blog content has a very specific job to do – it needs to engage users and encourage them to take next steps, whether that’s exploring the rest of your website, signing up for your newsletter or responding to another call to action. Google has also introduced penalties based on bounce rates that make it even more important to ensure that people don’t leave your blog pages before they’ve read more than a few lines. So, how do you ensure that your blogs have the power to really engage?

Make sure the page loading speed isn’t an obstacle

Blogs that take a long time to load will invariably lose the interest of the user within a matter of seconds. If your SEO has worked to the point that it’s your website where someone lands to read about a specific topic or piece of news, don’t waste this with a delay between their clicking on the link and being able to read the blog. Key to this is uploading images that are the correct size for their placeholder on the site. If the image is too large for the site container it will be squashed in when you upload it – the end result will be page loading speeds that are frustratingly slow.

Track more than just page views

Google Analytics measures bounce rate on the basis of page view but that’s not the only interaction that should be used to identify the correct bounce rate statistic. If you change the default setting in Analytics to start tracking other interactions too then you can positively influence bounce rate – why not measure interactions with embedded video as well, for example, or social button clicks.

Make sure your blog is mobile optimised

It’s a basic requirement today, given the extent to which we all browse blogs on our devices. Nevertheless it remains surprising how many blogs and websites are still not optimised, causing a lot of frustration to the people trying to interact with them. Someone browsing on a device will bounce instantly if a website is not optimised for mobile so, even if you do nothing else, make sure you take this one step if you want to reduce bounce rate overall.

Improve the UX of your blog

Bad user experience is a fast track to high bounce rates and being marked down by Google when it comes to the search engine evaluating whether this is a valuable site. There are lots of different ways to improve UX, from removing pop ups to rewriting the content and ensuring that the site is easy to navigate. A clear and obvious call to action is another key component. It’s this that will help the user to engage, not just with the page they have landed on, but with the rest of the site too. Write your calls to action in the first person and make sure that they are prominent and clear.

If you want to improve the bounce rate of your blog there are some simple ways to do this. We can help you optimise your blog to ensure you get the most from investment in content – contact us to find out more.