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You start your blog with some obvious expectations. The most important achievement remains to attract more readers and get followers for your blog. You must track your blog’s visitors to get an idea of your traffic. However, you should also concentrate on the traffic that bounces off.
Let us begin by understanding what exactly a blog’s bounce rate is. Each day you have new visitors to your blog. However, some (or most) of these visitors will simply leave your blog immediately after landing on your blog.
They either simply click the back button or close the tab, because:
- They found your site irrelevant – for instance they may have searched for chocolates and your site which is about bicycles came up.
- They did not find the information useful (even though it is relevant).
- They did not like your site (there could be many reasons including the appearance of your site).
The calculation of bounce rate is based on the formula:
Bounce Rate = Total single page view visits/Total number of visits
You can track your blog’s bounce rate with Google Analytics. However, what you need to do is try to use some tips to make your blog more feasible to the visitors. You have to improve your blog to stop people from simply clicking the back button. Every single visitor is highly valuable for your blogging business and you don’t want to lose them, right?
Let’s see what we can do about it.
Keep It Clutter Free:
If your blog posts are riddled with Google Adsense or advertisements in general, there is a fine chance that your visitors might not take the extra time to navigate through all that clutter to get to the information in your blog post.
You have to make sure that you have a very easy and user-friendly environment in your blog. This will make it easier for the visitors to get to the juicy part of your quality content; that is all they really want so chances are they will come back the next time too.
Focus The Spotlight On Popular Posts:
Highlighting your best posts can get you repeat traffic as well as snare in new visitors for you. Many blogs overlook this necessary step and their best posts remain hidden in their blogs. Do not make this mistake.
Analyze your blog stats to find out which posts are the most popular and then try to highlight them at some conspicuous place in your blog.
If you don’t offer an option for your readers to look for more, they will most probably leave.
Interlinking Is Important:
Whenever you mention or even refer to any of your earlier posts in your current post, make sure to link to the relevant posts. You can use anchor texts and convert them to links. This establishes that you are talking with some background reference which is already in your blog.
Also, they will get to check out multiple posts which will give you a better chance to stop them from jumping off immediately after reading your post.
Categorize Your Blog Posts:
When you use categories in your blog, you give your visitors a sort of menu to your blog. They can now choose the category that they most desire and can read the posts that interest them.
You should also display categories in your blog on your sidebar, footer or as a secondary navigation bar after the header. This is a surefire way of increasing reader engagement and hence reducing bounce rate.
Aim For Highest Quality Content:
Your content is by far the most important thing in your blog. There is nothing more than quality to keep your readers hooked to your blog.
Creating high quality content is always up to you. You have to expand your expertise in your niche and come up with creative ideas to share with your readers.
Be unique and useful. Do not be “just another blogger” in your niche. Be known for your quality.
Speed Up Your Blog:
Just as you are busy writing and promoting your blog, your readers are busy too. They can’t wait for more than 5-10 seconds for your blog to load. They can very well click the back button to look for the information elsewhere.
Always keep an eye on your blog’s loading speed. Page speed (an extension for Chrome and can be used with Firebug on Firefox) is an excellent handy tool to check your loading speed.
Keep the plugins to least since any 3rd party codes could make your blog to load slowly. Go for a premium theme like Thesis Theme to make sure your coding is clean and clutter free.
Blogs with high bounce rates are bad entities. High number of visitors going out of your blog on a single page visit doesn’t signal anything nice, does it? Use these tips to improve your blog’s bounce rate.
Well i read somewhere that 75% bounce rate is idle for blogs. Is that true Jane?
In my experience this is true, most blogs have very high bounce rate
Tushar, 75% cannot be called ideal, but it is the usual one. One should always work hard to reduce it.
i use related posts , interlinked articles and something thumbnails to get the visitor to check another page , this brings down the bounce rate
Well explained Jane. we need to prevent excessive bounce rate and aim on retaining our visitors. I’m sure it’s not easy to get them in the first place, why lose them. Thanks for sharing on these powerful nuggets. Great post!
“it’s not easy to get them in the first place, why lose them” – well said Michael. Every visitor is highly important to every blogger 🙂
This is so true Jane. Thanks for this post.
if you write and design your blog to target one reader , it is good for 1000 readers too .
According to my knowledge 60% to 70% is the ideal bounce rate of blog.High quality and research based contents are always very helpful to enhance the interest of the readers.
This is good information for people like me who are trying to reduce the bounce rate on our sites. However, what happens if a visitor arrives at the site and clicks one of the links in an AdSense ad without clicking on another page of the site? Is that still counted as a bounce because there is only a single page view even though the user did not close the window/tab or press the back button to leave the site?
Karl, that’s a good question. Clicking on adsense is still leaving your blog, which means your visitor has already bounced and reached the landing page of that ad.
And as far as bounce rate is calculated, even though the visitor stayed for 30 mins on your blog on a single page and then clicked any *outgoing* link, it is still considered as one page view (and hence a bounce).
Hope I answered your question.
Thank you for your reply. This would seem to explain the difficulty I have had in lowering the bounce rates at my largest site Karlonia.com, where they have always been very high (92 to 93 percent). Back in November 2009 I attempted to lower the bounces by taking the top 20 posts with the most unique visitors and inserting links to relevant Amazon product pages in them, usually near the bottom of the article as a “resource link” or “helpful resource” of some sort. My thinking at the time was that if I could get the visitors to click through on something instead of just backing out that these might be counted as non-bounces, but apparently this was not correct. It seems that I will need to focus more on internal linking and directing visitors to related posts within the same site instead of just getting clickthroughs to advertisements or affiliate links.
It turns out that this little campaign did reduce the bounce rate, but by only a single percentage point (from 93.5 to 92.5 percent). As a small side bonus I ended up gaining an average of 600 clickthroughs per month to Amazon along with $10-20 per month in commissions.
I’ve done interlinking whenever I have time and I’ve placed category on my blog. I have one question you mention this “Analyze your blog stats to find out which posts are the most popular and then try to highlight them at some conspicuous place in your blog.” do you have a recommended software of site to analyze the popular post on your blog.
You can always use google analytics to find out your popular content. You can place links to your popular posts on your sidebar to make them more popular.
ok thanks I’m already using google analytics ever since I started blogging.
You have a nice post Jane Sheeba! It has good information and it teaches me on some matters regarding to those who immediately close browsers because it is irrelevant. why would you put potato chips on your sites if you are talking about computers anyway? this is a big help for me and to maximize my potential.
I’ve always read that quality content on the niche of your blog is very important to keep your blog running. But i am so lazy of writing quality content on my blog that I prefer buying it from some experts. But again i have to count some money for that, so I manage to write a couple of posts in a week and even that much is enough for my blog to get regular returning visitors. Now, i came to know the importance of quality content. Thanks Jane..
About 2 months ago when i was checking a new blog on Google Analytics, i found that the bounce rate is nearly 100%. I checked the other day and the results were the same. To be honest i thought that the home page had an irrelevant content from what people are looking for, but after a while it appeared that the blog load speed was the issue. I changed the template and everything came back to normal.
I always thought that bounce rate doesn’t really matter. Anyway the thing is that i already follow all these steps right now. And my bounce rate is around 30%. So i guess i don’t have to be worried about my bounce rate 😀 Thanks for sharing..
Aside from having great, interesting content and implementing strategies to keep them reading, I believe a good blog layout and design really does make a difference. Nobody wants a cluttered website and a really impressive color, design and layout scheme would keep your visitors glued.