12 Ideas To Keep Visitors On Your Site Longer

The typical rule of thumb for a good “bounce rate” (the rate at which visitors leave your site without clicking to another page) is between 30-50%. But if your bounce rate is way higher than the “industry norm”, not to worry, because there are ways to keep visitors on your site longer and they aren’t complicated.

Here are some ideas:

1. Tell A Story

This is the oldest trick in the book, tell a great story. Stories can capture an audience and keep people wanting more and wanting to learn more; keep them engaged and they’ll stay on your site longer and learn more about what you offer. People are bombarded with thousands of messages everyday so it is smart to stay original and not focus too much on the typical and the overused tactics. Tell a story; go back to the basics.

2. Use Exit Intent Technology

This tactic can be pretty useful and involves a pop-up offer or notice that gets triggered when a visitor’s mouse hovers up towards the top of the browser window.

3. Open External Links In New Windows

You want to keep visitors on your site longer right? Do not have links going outside of your site to open in the same window, have external links open in a new window so that your website still stays open. Keep navigation and your site as simple to the visitor as humanly possible. It’s the little things that count!

4. Leave A Few Links In Your Content For Cross-Surfing

Try, when possible, to incorporate links in your written content that links to other written content on your site. Doing this will keep visitors on your site longer and will further decrease your bounce rate.

5. Ask Interesting or Conversation-Provoking Questions

Where possible ask intriguing questions that cause people to take the time to leave a comment or start further discussions. This is also a great way to create further outreach to the visitors on your site.

6. Add Statistics

People have been found to trust content or trust what they read more if there are statistics present. Where possible and realistic, incorporate statistics which further your point.

7. Upgrade Your Images

Get rid of your tacky outdated google images. Try checking out Unsplash, Canva, Pixabay, or Pikwizard for free and amazing images. Imagery seriously makes or breaks a website, so take it seriously.

8. Add Images Of People

It has been proven that people respond to images where people’s faces are shown as opposed to inanimate objects or even beautiful pieces of art. People like to feel connected even if it’s subliminal and a picture of someone they don’t even know. Again, imagery is paramount but images of people is even more important.

9. Apply visual breaks to your written content.

People don’t read long paragraphs of text or even text in general for that matter, however when you have something to say and you’re writing it online try and respect people’s huge lack of attention span. Break up the content into bullet points, or throw a nice picture in a paragraph, use subheadings, use quotes, or make bold, important phrases. In other words, make your written content not only intellectually appealing but visually as well.

10. Use A Larger Font Size

A study done by Smashing Magazine suggested that using a font smaller than 16px could affect the bounce rate of your site (and that means in a bad way). This blog post is 20px BTW.

11. Use 2 Different Font Styles – MAX

Keep it clean and don’t overload your content with more than two fonts.

12. Simplify Your Design

It’s easy to spot an old website design right away, there’s clutter, moving things, things that don’t work, etc. Typically you have 15 seconds max to convince your visitor that your design is modern, worth looking at, and worth learning more about, so make that 15 seconds count and get rid of the clutter.