After you have set up your website or blog, the next step is drive large volume of traffic. So, you start to optimize your website for organic search, build links and promote your site through multiple popular social networking platforms. Of course, your website starts getting a lot of traffic. The actual problem arises when you review your site’s analytics. You are surprised and worried to notice the high bounce rate of your website. The higher the bounce rate, the less traffic stays on your website. A lower bounce rate means visitors stay on your site for longer.

So, the next important step is to reduce your website’s bounce rate. To successfully accomplish the task of reducing the bounce rate, you need to have a look into your Google analytics.

A. Reviewing Your Google Analytics
There’s no doubt that Google analytics offers you very useful data that gives you a deep insight into the various aspects of your website including the content, keywords, site searches and traffic sources among others. By looking into Google analytics, you will be able to find pages that have a higher bounce rate and the pages that bring you a high volume of traffic.

You can dig into the high bounce rate pages further. Along with finding the pages with high bounce rate, you can also have a look at the entrance keywords that send traffic to those pages. Compare the various search terms and bounce rate in analytics. If the bounce rate is high, that means visitors weren’t able to find something that they came looking for on your page. Once you know this, you can start optimizing those pages and adding useful information so that visitors find what they are looking for. As a result the bounce rate for those modified pages will reduce.

The next important step is to review the site search results in your Google analytics. Setting up site search allows you to track the terms that visitors key in into the search box on your website. Reviewing the site search analytics will help you to add content that visitors are trying to find on your site. This can further help you to reduce the bounce rate.

B. Reducing the Bounce Rate
Given below are some key steps that can help you lower the bounce rate of your website and allow visitors to stay longer.

1. Valuable Content
Each webpage on your site should provide great content to visitors. Once you have found out pages with high bounce rate, the very first step is to focus on optimizing those pages and add informative content to reduce the bounce rate.

2. Keyword Optimization
There can be two major reasons behind pages having a high bounce rate. Either those pages do not provide great content or those pages are optimized for the right keyword or phrases. One of major reasons for pages (with valuable content) having a high bounce rate is that they have not been targeted with the right keyword phrases. In this case, optimizing those pages for the right keywords will reduce the bounce rate.

3. Adding Videos
If you want to enhance the content of your web pages even more, you can consider adding related videos. Videos that enrich the value of your site’s content would help to lower the bounce rate and retain visitors.

4. Page Summary
If your site’s pages are long, you can also include a short summary at the top of the page or the blog post. Adding a summary at the top will help visitors to instantly find out whether the page will offer something they are searching for. This is a good step towards reducing the site bounce rate.

5. Related Links
If you want visitors to stick around, one of the most useful ways is to add related links at the end of the page or the blog post on your website. Relevant interlinking through the page content is also a great way to reduce the website’s bounce rate and allow visitors to stay longer.

If you appropriately review the analytics of your website, you will definitely come to know what steps you should take to reduce the site’s bounce rate. Above mentioned are some of the most important tips to help you lower the bounce rate and compel users to spend more time on your website or blog.