As a blogger, its one of our goals to try to reduce our blog’s bounce rate. Of course, we all want to have people read our stuff and if possible stay on our site for a longer period of time. And do take note that its not just about staying on our blog doing nothing, its about them staying on our site but reading various content from us.
In this blog entry, I’ll discuss different ways on how we as a blogger can reduce our blog’s bounce rate.
What is Bounce Rate?
According to Google themselves, bounce rate is simply just the percentage of single or one-page visits on your site. This is also when a visitor exits on the same page as they entered. So as an example, if you visited this post and then left my blog through this post, you will be considered as a user who ‘bounced’ from my blog.
A very high bounce rate is indicative of various things like a).incorrect sets of audience for your site, b).poor content on your end and etc. So generally if you’re having a very high bounce rate, then you must be concerned that you’re falling into one of those two things I mentioned.
And you can read the following tips below on how you can reduce bounce rate on your site.
Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate
1. Have a landing page
I have been preaching on this method ever since and it seems that lots of bloggers don’t really understand the value of it. I’ve written a post on how using a landing page can increase your traffic but more importantly by using one, you are allowing yourself to attract the right people for your blog.
Think about it, a visitor is more likely to stay and navigate if he is directed to a specific landing page rather than straight to the homepage. Why would we want them to read our stuff more? We want to prove that we’re worth reading of course and that we know what we’re talking about.
2. Eliminate annoying elements
If you think about it, most people who navigate away from your site do it very quickly. Most of time its as quick as less than 10 seconds. There are various reasons for this but by analyzing it yourself, its more likely because they are annoyed on your site as a whole.
Most people don’t like ads, or they don’t like those lightbox popups. Some of them don’t like the sliders and all the fancy stuff. Obviously its hard to please everyone but you should at least try to please the majority. Easiest solution for this is to try minimizing your blog elements.
3. Write good content
Visitors don’t just land on your homepage or designated landing page. Most of the times they land on the specific blog post or article. With this, its very important to write good content to be able to persuade first time visitors to stay more and read more. You can do a simple test and compare your crappy posts from your best posts. You can easily spot the difference in bounce rate and see that your visitors stay with good content. Pretty fundamental tip!
4. Improve Loading Times
I am guilty of this myself. I used to sport themes before that load horribly slow due to lots of javascript stuff. As a result, lots of my readers probably just went away.
Make sure to work on always improving loading speed of your site. Check with Google Webmaster Central Site Performance Tool to see if your site is loading quick enough to satisfy the majority.
5. Minimize External Links
As bloggers, we’re naturally aren’t too shabby to hand out links to other bloggers. Its definitely not bad to give link loves but it sometimes has its own disadvantages and one of those is people going away from your own content. Another is diluting your pagerank although if you know me, I don’t really care that much about search benefits.
So just try to limit linking externally to other sites as it may be one of the reasons why your bounce rate is high.
Conclusion
Just like anything else, bounce rate is just a metric. I am always a proponent of studying your numbers and tweaking based on what it reflects. But still, you must never ever dwell too much on it. Don’t look at your bounce rate stats every 6 hours or so as it can obviously hamper your focus and productivity.
Personally, I do analyze my bounce rate a lot and do the necessary things that I think can help me out more in the long run. How about you? What’s your bounce rate and what’s your best tip to reduce it?
Hi Melvin,
I liked this article because I like to watch my bounce rate as well. We want to keep our visitors staying longer and coming back.
I don’t have a landing page yet, but I’m going to read your info on it. Tentblogger.com also advocates for one. Thanks for the good info. Sally
I’m guilty of number 5! But I’m wondering though… Of course you don’t want people to accuse you of plagiarism so you want to cite references to give credit where it’s due. So I wanna ask how many is too many in terms of external links?
Of course, thank you for all the tips as usual.
I like your idea’s here, I find that my bounce is around 50% on my main KW’s and when i rank for ones that are really just answering a question, such as how did so and so do this? I get a much higher bounce of 75%+. I find it hard to mix ads and keep the bounce down as removing them reduces bounce considerably but doesn’t make me money. It’s a fine line.
What would you consider a high bounce rate versus a low bounce rate?
Many top blogs like problogger and copyblogger have bounce rates around the 50% mark.
Hey Melvin,
I have a high bounce rate, and I have been thinking a lot about ways to reduce it. I have been looking at my stats via Google Analytics, and what I have found is that the posts with content not related to my blog have a very high bounce rate. Some posts have 100%, and many have close to 100%. It doesn’t matter how good the quality is (because I believe the posts are great), as long as the content is not related to the topic of my blog.
For instance, I get between 80 and 100 visitors a day to a post about download Facebook banners. This is a post I wrote a long time ago, and what I did was get a designer to create some good looking “join me on Facebook” banners. I am giving them away for free. A lot of people have visited the post and downloaded the banners. The problem is that none have stayed on my blog and subscribed to it. They just want the banners, they’re not interested in marketing at all 🙂
Your advice is great though, I have reduced the bounce rate by removing distractions as well.
Jens
I can’t really give a figure for how many is too many but as much as possible I try to limit mine to less than five. Of course you’re not gonna do lots of link for every posts so I think its just fine to do lots on some posts.
But as far as citing references, I do hope you’re not citing a lot because doing so means most part of your content just came from somebody, know what I mean? 😉
I think it depends on your site and the business model its using. My bounce rate last year was around 35-55% although since i haven’t posted that much this year, it went up to 65-75%.
I was inferred that 50-60% should be just fine but again it depends.
Correct. However, (I know its evil) your loyal readers will start to tune out your ads and that they wouldn’t notice it anymore which makes it an advantage for you. The new visits are usually the ones that click on an ad although it depends on where they’re coming from.
Its really tricky I would say. Notice how I kinda gave a disclaimer on my conclusion on not to worry so much about it (yet still analyze it at times)? :p Bounce rates is purely for content, it rarely represents the entire picture.
Good example is when you’re flaunting your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Lets say your giving away an eBook thats superb.If the copy of the form is really good and convincing, lots of people will sign up to the newsletter which is a good thing. However when you analyze your Analytics, you’d see that the bounces are really high since they’re moving away from your site going to your newsletter (oftentimes thankyou page is hosted by the email marketing service) . So them signing up is almost like them bouncing away from your site.
Another factor is on where they’re coming from. Your Facebook examples above exactly shows that. Those people came from search and their main intention is just to get the banners. They might not be even marketers like us so they’re just bouncing
Those are just some examples and I have lots of these in my mind. 🙂
Hey Melvin!
Interesting post!
Great to know more about bounce rate. I learned a lot reading your post. Thank you for sharing this very informative and helpful post.
Hey Melvin, Thanks! very helpful post. The article about how to setup a landing page helped me big time. Im now looking into it, how I can improve this.
There is a lot of talk about Bounce rate after the google panda update. My sites boucne rate fluctuates from 50% to 70%. We have approximately 15,000 vistiros a month that come in through more than 7,000 different keywords. SOme of our pages have a 100% bounce rate, but the reason is becuase they recevied the information they wanted and then they leave. For example, I have a Frequently ASked question that has a 100% bounce rate last month, but received 50 unique visits and the user spent 1:30 on the page. Thsi page had a lot of value to the user that came to the site. Do you think that after the Google Panda update that Good is penalizing pages that have a high bounce rate? How could Google deal with a page that is an FAQ with a high bounc rate, yet is the exact content that the USER was searching for?
WHat would you sugges to do in this situation? We have considered limitng the text on the page, and making a user click a link to read more content. This is annoying for a user, but if we need to reduce our bounce rate do we really have a choice? Should we be concerend about this?
Thanks
hi,
My website has unique and quality content, it doesn’t has any annoying element, no external links are there, but still bounce rate is 70%. whats wrong 🙁
Really great tips to reduce bounce rate. I have just removed footer bar to reduce page load time.
You might be amazed to know that on one of my blogs the post with highest bounce rate generates the highest Adsense Revenue everyday..!!
cool! Glad you found it useful.
Well first and foremost sorry for the late reply.
First is I don’t know much about Google Panda but one thing I can say is that if your page thats getting a high bounce rate is being utilized well or is converting properly based on your goal, then don’t worry that much about bounce rate. Good example of this is download sites. You see, the goal in download sites is to just download the stuff and obviously visitors will download it and boom, theyre gone. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. Another is adsense sites. For adsense sites you don’t want them to stick, but rather you want them to click your ad. So pretty much they’re gone but your goal is accomplished which is to click an ad.
Also, bounce rate DOESN’T have anything to do with search rankings so I think you shouldn’t worry at all about its impact on penalizing pages. Also, just do whats best for your readers. If you think they’re getting annoyed with your new implementation, then just don’t do it. Again, bounce rate is a very very little metric that shouldn’t factor that much on you and your site. And on your case, you shouldn’t be concerned at all.
Never ever compensate usability for search ranking stuff. At the end of the day, your users are the ones using you and possibly making you money, not search engines, not the metrics.
Yeah, thats why I mentioned that bounce rate varies based on whats the goal on a certain page. I even used it as an example in one of my comments above. 😉
Hi melvin
Nice post. i have been looking for methods to try and increase my blogs bounce rate for ages.
Keep up the great reads !
Thank you for the tips. My blog has an awful bounce rate of 80% and I’ve been researching a lot on how to lower it but to no avail yet.
Thanks for this list. I was pressured when I suddenly seen that my bounce rate has gone so high lately. I’m not exactly sure why, but for now I’ll try your suggestions.
Thanks again!
my website getting more bounce rate, i m getting trouble to reduce it, this may help me.. thanks.
The blog is absolutely fantastic. Lots of great information and inspiration, both of which we all need. Thanks.