How to Reduce Bounce Rate by 40% with Link Previews

TL;DR The article introduces two new approaches to reduce bounce rates & improve SEO.

1. Automatic link preview on hover. Show a summary of a linked page in a popup, e.g. Ansel Adams
2. Automatic immersive link preview on click. Show the content of a linked webpage inside your website, e.g. bounce rate factors

Both approaches result in visitors gaining value from linked content and are less likely to follow a link and leave your website. You can install automatic link previews for free on Linkz.ai‍

Every website owner hates having a high bounce rate. It’s hard enough to get people to visit your website, but when you check your Google Analytics account and everyone is bouncing. That’s frustrating. So what can you do about it?

When it comes to reducing bounce rate, there are several steps you can take. But one tactic that many people don’t know about is to make use of link previews.

Here’s our guide to what you need to know about bounce rates, how to reduce them, and how to take full advantage of link previews to get your bounce rate down even further.

What Makes Bounce Rate High?

There are many potential reasons why your bounce rate could be too high.

Low-quality content is often cited as the major issue. Content is always king, whether on news blogs, a company website, or something else. So you need a good content marketing strategy in place to avoid publishing dull content or content that provides little value. In addition to low-quality content on your personal blog or business website, various other factors can affect bounce rate including:

• Website Speed – Visitors become frustrated and leave when the website takes too long to load.
• Lack of Mobile Friendliness – If your site looks strange or is hard to navigate on a mobile device, prepare for a high bounce rate.
• Poor Navigation – If users are confused about where to go and there is no site search functionality, they won’t hang around for long.

While all of these issues are well known and understood, there is one factor that you may not have considered yet: Hyperlinks.

Let’s take a closer look at hyperlinks and how they impact bounce rate.

What’s the Problem with Hyperlinks?

Hyperlinks are often considered an essential element of on-page search engine optimization (SEO). Linking to authoritative sources can help to back up your claims, and it’s often a good idea to link to a few high-ranking domains in your content.

On top of that, they help create a positive user experience. By linking to an authoritative source or to another page on your website, you can either provide users with a better experience or help to improve navigation, both of which are important.

But here’s the problem: If site visitors click on the external links you provide in your content, they may well find something more interesting. The internet is full of distractions, and there is no saying that they will return to your website.

After all the effort you’ve made generating traffic to your website, you’ve gone and provided your visitors with a good excuse to leave through adding hyperlinks.

How Link Previews Can Help

As you can see, hyperlinks present a serious challenge to anyone who wants to reduce bounce rate. You want to include them in your content to improve the user experience and search rankings, but you don’t want your visitors to click on them and then fail to return.

The answer? Link previews.

Using link previews instead of standard hyperlinks provides you with a simple and effective way to reduce the bounce rate on your website.

Let’s take a look at what exactly link previews are and why you should be using them.

What Are Link Previews?

Hover your mouse over a hyperlink on a website, and the chances are that nothing happens. Your mouse changes to a little hand-click symbol, and you’re tempted to find out where it leads.

Soon after, just a few clicks later, you find yourself somewhere else entirely, reading an interesting article or watching a fascinating video. You’ve forgotten about the original web page where you clicked the hyperlink.

A link preview prevents this from happening.

This time, when you hover over the hyperlink, instead of having to click it to find out where it leads, you immediately see a preview of the page like this:

You can decide instantly whether you want to visit the page or not. Chances are, you’d prefer to continue on the page.

Linkz.ai Makes It Easy

Linkz.ai makes it easier than ever to use link previews on your website. Simply add the script to your website, and when visitors hover over a hyperlink, they will see a popup preview of the content. So you don’t have to hate hyperlinks anymore.

You’re sticking to SEO best practices and providing every site visitor with a better experience. But there is less chance that they feel the need to click the link and leave your page.

Your bounce rate falls by as much as 40%—and it’s all so easy!

Use Immersive Link Previews to Reduce Bounce Rate Further

But what if you link to a video or other rich content like audio or presentations?

Media and rich content can be particularly tempting for visitors, and you don’t want to avoid linking to them in your content because it improves the experience for users.

That’s why, when you link to a popular video, Linkz.ai opens the media within your website using immersive previews.

Now visitors can watch the YouTube video or presentation without leaving your site.

Now you’ve improved the experience for them, and you’ve reduced your bounce rate at the same time.

Another Way Link Previews Help

Remember at the start of the article where we warned against slow websites affecting bounce rate? People love fast websites, and link previews can help here too.

Embedding YouTube videos can slow your website down, affecting the user experience. When you use link previews with Linkz.ai, you can instead create an image thumbnail, hyperlink it, and Linkz.ai will then load the YouTube embed.

When someone clicks the thumbnail, they get a great user experience, and your website stays lightning fast.

Try Linkz.ai Today

Fed up with high bounce rates? Want to improve the user experience while reducing bounce rate on your site? Then try Linkz.ai today!

It’s completely free to start using on your website or a network of your own blogs, and you can easily install it on a WordPress blog with a custom domain or another type of website or blogging software. Adding it to your website takes no more than two minutes, and you’ll be reducing your bounce rate in no time.

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