Let me start by letting you know that high bounce rate is not good for your blog and you should do everything within your power to reduce it to the barest minimum. If you already know what a bounce rate is, why are you not monitoring and improving on it? If you do not know what a bounce rate is, read on.
What is a Blog’s bounce rate?
Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who came to your site and left almost immediately, probably after viewing just one page on your blog. Many bloggers have this problem and they do not know it. They just keep sourcing for traffic outside and these visitors don’t even spend up to a minute on your blog before they leave. Some even pay for Google Adwords and Facebook ads to get this traffic. This can be frustrating when it seems you are just wasting money. If you have been experiencing something similar, check your blog’s bounce rate now.
How To Check You Blog’s Bounce Rate:
Here is how I normally use to check my Blog’s bounce rate:
Google Analytics: The default view on your dashboard will include a small section showing some of your overall vitals which also includes your bounce rate. That is if you haven’t customized your analytics dashboard too much anyway. If your bounce rate is somewhere in the league of 50%, 60%, there is a problem. As far as I am concerned, 20% bounce rate is too much for me. It’s left to you to decide what you want.
Six Causes and How to significantly reduce bounce rate:
1. You are not interlinking your blog posts: one major reason you have a high bounce rate is that you are not linking to your older articles. There are ways by which you can solve this:
- When you are making reference to a piece of information contained in your old posts, link to them. This WordPress old posts interlinking feature is available by default in WordPress.
- Use Interlinking WordPress plugins. They use keywords and/or tags to link back to your old posts with similar keywords.
For example, if you write a statement like “How to get more Backlinks” and you have an old article that talked about backlink, it would link to it automatically.
- Use related posts widget/plugin to show a list of posts that are related to the one the visitor just read and this will keep them longer on your site when they click to read them.
2. You are not handling external links rightly: to reduce your bounce rate, you have to make it a habit of making external links open in new tabs or windows. When this is overdone, it annoys your users. Take note of that.
3. Too many ads: having too many ads on your blog adds too many external links and remember that most ads open in that same tab you are, so it’s always goodbye to your blog after one page view. Reduce the number of ads and improve on how you place them.
4. Your blog design and layout is bad: There are several improvements you should make in this area to reduce bounce rate, they include but not limited to
- Make use of you sidebar wisely. Use the latest post and comments widgets as this can encourage a visitor to read your other posts and also make comments
- Use excerpts on your blog index instead of displaying the whole article. This can make the page too long for the visitors to keep scrolling thereby frustrating them to leave. Also, excerpts makes your visitors read more instead of reading the whole piece on the home page and taking off
- Display your blog categories and pages prominently too. It helps!
- Use an easy-to-read font and font size on you blog.
5. You don’t have a search box on your blog: if you have a way to track how visitors relate with your search box, you will be shocked to find out how often visitors still use it. if your visitors can’t find what they are looking for, they can easily make use of the search engine instead of leaving.
Note that you should display your search box prominently on your blog; where people can notice it easily.
6. No 404 pages? Too bad: use 404 pages to receive your visitor when they come through a link that has been removed or when they type your URL with mistakes in it. Help them find the information they are looking for with 404 not found page. Place a few links like a link to your homepage, categories or sitemap.
These are just some of the causes and solution I identified and solved on my blog. You should lay your hands on them too if you have a high bounce rate. You can’t afford to be losing your visitors, turn them to regular readers.
When creating a blog, It is given that you’ll be having a topic that you would like or love to share. One of the reasons why blog publishers get a lot of bounce rates perhaps their article or page was submitted on a website where it focuses or it has a different niche or the publisher wasn’t targeting the right people at all. Usually joining a community with the same interest reduces or alleviates the number of bounce rates..
Regards,
Cashforsmartphones.com
Twitter: divyanshojha
says:
Another important thing about advertising is to avoid text links ads like infolinks….
Though info links is good source of income but it reduces the list of your visitors everyday.
Divyansh recently posted..Make Free Calls To Any Mobile Using PC Internet Connection
Couldn’t agree more, Infolinks sucks big time
Twitter: daayur
says:
Nice tips for every blogger useful for improvement
Twitter: cynamix
says:
The problem I think many blogger has is that they want to make money as well as increase their pageviews. How do they strike a balance? That’s a topic for another day! Did I write many bloggers? I meant to write all bloggers.
Twitter: daayur
says:
This is one good thing i will always read over and over inorder to put things in order on ma blog.its nice
Twitter: mavtrevor
says:
Nice post, straight to point….concise and informative. thanks for the info as this will help bloggers like me track our visitors behavior better.
Nwosu Desmond recently posted..Free social media automation methods
does high bounce rate results in low PR?
samy jain recently posted..Is Google Panda 3.9 Out?
Twitter: cynamix
says:
I once read that Google do monitor the time visitors spend on your website when they go through search engine. Taking off immediately might indicate that your content did not provide the quality they required. It might affect it.
Ogundimu Ahmed recently posted..Google Engineer Matt Cutts Explains The Importance Of Backlinks
Can High bounce rate effects the site indexing in bing and yahoo
Vishal recently posted..How to change IP Address
infolinks are jerks, they are bull****, don’t try them plz….for god sake
vipin recently posted..Nokia’s Window’s Phone 8 Devices
truly a great article. i’m seriously gonna remember these things from next time
Abhinav recently posted..Blog SEO | Increase Blog Traffic | Free Targeted Traffic
Another important thing about advertising is to avoid text links ads like infolinks….
Seo Basics recently posted..How To Move From Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Traffic or Ranks?
Twitter: augustusvibe
says:
Am having the bounce rate trouble, Bounce Rate: 88.18%. Am going to make use of the tips here and report back when there is improvement. Thanks for sharing.
TipsonPoint recently posted..How To Protect Computer From Virus and Worm.
your tips are really useful for every blogger. thanks.
Twitter: doncybertips
says:
hmmmnnnnn….i love this….. Am putting it into practice now
doncyber recently posted..Step by Step Instructions to Add a Newsletter Signup Box After Your Post in Genesis Framework
it is great psot thaks for post…
Twitter: ramisbusy
says:
This post shows the value of unique visitors in a site thanks for the awesome post great !
Twitter: techbuzzes
says:
How many internal links are healthy for one post ?? is keeping more than 3 internal link on one post, bad for blog?
Mohammed Siadath Ali recently posted..Google Now on iOS via Google Search App