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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.
Great article! it all comes down to first impressions, just as when you meet someone you really have to give them a smile to give them the hint that you want to get to know them better. i feel the same with blogging you really have to give a great first impression so people just don’t bounce but stay and interact on your site!
Yup Cally that’s the point. If we manage to make that first impression to be the best one, we’re lucky 🙂
I have got 55% to 60% bounce rate 🙁 but working hard to keep it down . Maybe I must make small showcase instead of sharing too many sources with images.
Atul, 55-60% bounce rate for a blog is the usual one; many blogs have that rate. But you should work hard to lower it.
I think that appearance does not matter too much as far as bouncing is concerned. You could have the crappiest looking site that can sustain the viewers or you could have the best looking site which is not really viewed by anyone! Depends on the content totally!
Siddarth, you may be partially right coz sometimes if you already know the blogger for their content you wouldn’t mind the look/appearance. But think about visiting a blog for the first time (you don’t know a thing about the blogger or the blog), then it is quite natural that you leave the page because of its amateurish or crappy look!
Great tips to reduce bounce rate Jane…. Truly said many blogs ignore to display their popular posts keeping them hidden 🙂
Nice post Sheeba. these points are really must to prevent traffic leakage from your blog. if the traffic is leaving your blogs than it must need some precaution which you explained very well. thanks for this helping post to help other bloggers to keep their visitors in touch with their post.
To grow traffic of any blog we just need to focus on what our visitors looking for. Thanks for tips, from some days i am also facing this problem.
I agree with using categories. In some blogs you wonder how the content is organized and the posts are hard to find, you have to jump through the hoops to find them. Tags also do the job, but I find them more cumbersome than good old categories.
It’s really hard to keep the people stick to our blog. I guess, offering some internal link in your article to keep all your articles connected may be work a little. Designed theme can attract people for the first sight. Whatever, the most important is the content. Keep your content informative to date.
I dont believe that having a high bounce rate is necessarily a sign that a blog is bad or people are leaving. There could be some blogs where the visitors will visit the homesite to see if there is a new post, and simply leave after that if there is not. The real key in my opinion is to really look into the stats and see why these people are leaving, sometimes its not a bad thing, but most of the time I will admit having a high bounce rate like means something needs to be changed.
-Jean
Thanks Sheeba For sharing that…Usage of a light template can reduce the bounce rate…Also updating a blog on regular basis gets more visitors..