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Reduce The Bounce Rate Of Your Blog
You are a blogger and you analyze your statistics from time to time. One point this software tracks is the ‘bounce rate‘. The bounce rate will tell you how many visitors click through to another page. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your pages views and the more people will come back for quality content.
If you have a high bounce rate, it might be a good idea to improve your website or blog. This question might rise to you: What can you do improve the bounce rate of your blog?
In this post, I will give you some pointers you should look at to keep visitors on your website and lower your bounce rate.
1. Structured navigation – Usually, people looking for a tutorial, search Google and they want to find the needed information as fast as possible. If they can’t find it right away, they leave and look for another site. If you have a structured navigation, you might seduce those people to click through to your homepage, about page or another article interested to them.
2. Uncluttering your sidebar – You should make sure your blog homepage contains the most useful information. Stop using those funny and useless widgets; instead you should use a ‘popular article’ widget or a ‘tag cloud’. People will more likely click on an article if they can find it right away, without looking through all kind of mess first.
3. Related articles – Your blog has a niche, meaning you have more tutorials and articles on the same subject. Why not make it easier for your visitors to click through a ‘related article’, at the end of your post? A nice plugin is available to do this called ‘Yet another Related Posts Plugin’ and will add a bunch of related posts at the end of your post.
4. About page – Some weblogs noticed new visitors navigated to the about page after they’ve read an article. It is important to make that information easy to find. People are lazy and if they can’t find it right away, they will leave. Help them and help yourself. People might stick around faster if they see there is a real guy or girl behind the weblog.
5. Surveys and polls – Interacting with your visitors is always a good idea. Eventually you could add a poll or survey to your blog and see what results they bring in. When people see an interesting question, they might reply or vote and stick around.
Questions
Of course, there are more points you could look at, but I think these are the most important. If you have any suggestions please mention them in the comments.
http://www.pagealizer.com does a really good job tracking bounce rate of your web pages
Trav – I have never used that. Thanks for pointing that out, I will check it sooner or later.
Im fairly new to blogs etc, but I don’t quite understand why a low bounce rate is better. Surely you would want more people to click through to your other articles or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?? Does that mean a click through to another website? Slightly confused here.
A lower bounce rate is better because you keep people on your blog for a longer time. The longer the people stay on your blog, the more advertisers are interested in your blog, because the click-through on your ads increase as well.
It is always good to keep people as long as possible on your blog. That’s a natural thought, I guess!
Thanks for asking.
Very nice info. What do you think should be the ideal bounce rate, well, nothing can be ideal…the lower the better but I’m talking about general bounce rate or a way to compare the bounce rate with others ?
@Mayank – Thanks. Well, the ideal bounce rate is 0%. But that will not happen! I think for a web-related blog a bounce rate around 30-40% is acceptable.
[...] I have published a post to reduce your bounce rate. One point I made there was ‘place a clear link to your about page’. But my own blog [...]
Hi Stefan,
I have started blogging about a month ago..its a sports blog..http://toomanyballs.blogspot.com.
However, how strong I try to post latest news and updates on my blog, but still by Google Analytics shows that my bounce rate is 84%. Would it be possible for you to visit my blog and suggest me how to reduce ny bounce rate?
I know, I am asking for more, but please visit my blog if you have time and suggest me a few methods to reduce the bounce rate.
Thank You
Soumen
Hi Soumen,
I’ve checked it a bit, and I think this complete article is there for blogs like yourself. Read the article again and try to really add all those points to your blog. That will work.
[...] more reasons to stay on your blog (to let them navigate easy, related articles, popular articles. Learn more).In Google Analytics: Visitors > Visitor trending > Bounce [...]
I need to pay more attention to my bounce rate. I always skim that section in Google Analytics.
[...] Divito Design suggests that you spend some time on your blog’s about page. People often look at your about page after reading an article on your website to learn about the author. [...]
Great post! You have some really helpful tips in there. I can’t agree more with the point you made about structured navigation. Remember, you will most often been more internet savvy than the readers on your blog so make it easy for them to navigate to guarantee their return!
I have checked out that link on the first comment and it really helps. It works wonderfully without any problems. I am having a problem with my bounce rate and am still working on fixing it. Thanks for the tips hopefully they will be enough to help a new user like me to fix my rate.
Thanks for this link it really is very usefull.
Good tips. However, one should realize that bounce rate depends as much on the kind of traffic as anything else. I get search and social media traffic, as a result of which my pageviews per visitor is 1.4 or so.
Everyone welcome! A lot of useful and interesting information. I think this blog with its wonderful themes will be interesting and useful to a large audience. Topics blog will be useful to many readers. The author of RESPECT.
Surely you would want more people to click through to your other articles but I could be wrong?
You have the greatest blogs… this is a really good idea and really informative.
thanks for this i will try to improve my bounce rate i think its around 35%
I’ve seen lot of people using Entrecard complain about their bounce rate. I guess if more of them took your advice. They will be able to solve their probs. Nice article.. Found it useful.
Do tag clouds lay any role when they are on the sidebar of your blog?
Yes, of course some people like what tags you have written about. So they might click to find more articles tagged like that.
@ bebo skins a bounce rate of 35% quite amazing bcz i think normal is around 55% acc to analytics
@ author(stefhan)I think using a read more link link is one more point that will help reduce it very effectively.
Adding Tags to the sidebar, also helps to reduce bounce rate. Just as related articles play the role of helping visitors to find their “desired content” so does Tags.
@Goji – That’s right, I agree with your point.
stefan, i have a kayout site for bebo skins, and when a user clicks on a link for one of the skins it takes them to their site, i guess this will mean i have a high bounce rate, is there anything i could do to have them go to their page but also keep my page open?
It’s possible to open another page (and you keep your page open) with link. I am not sure if this helps reducing the bounce rate though..
I don’t necessarily agree with the people saying that the TAGS will convert. I truly think it lies in the first few sentences of the article. Within those first few moments they start to read… They’ll know whether or not they want to stick around.
Great blog Stefan I’m glad I found you!
Air Purifiers – Thanks for your positive feedback! And I agree with what you say, but tags can work with a number of users too.
Uncluttering the sidebar and giving the readers readily avialable links to realated content is the most important I think.
Awesome article. I’m still new to blogging. This will definitely help me with my stuff. Thanks for posting such a useful post. Cheers
Great Advice,
Awesome reducing your bounce rate is one of the most important things you can do for a website. Traffic, SEO, referrals wont mean much if the users leave within seconds from entering your website.
I write my blog just two weeks, new part of skills for me! This will be useful I think
sorry for my english =)
Yes,
I agree with keeping the blog simple and easy to navigate. I’ve seen some blogs that have so much graphics, that you can’t for the life of the searcher where the content is….and then, you get the dreaded click out! Sandy
Thanks for the useful post. I’m still a newbie for this stuff and I’m sure this is something I need to know. A definite bookmark. Keep posting.
collections and top-lists are also a good alternative.
I always try to use a template that will be soothing and inviting to the reader. And I don’t have a million ads and flashing banners !
Well that was something I didn’t know. The article was really awesome. even a starter like me was able to gt it clearly. Great stuff. I need to keep the tips in mind for my future blogging. Thanks a lot.
That’s an awesome list. One of my friend recommended your site to me as I’m still new to blogging and this gave me a lot of information. Thanks for the cool list. Cheers
Hmmmm interesting. I’m still very new to blogging and didn’t know anything about this. the post helped me understand a lot of stuff. thank you for that. Will definitely try your tips on my blog. Thanks again
Great information. I never knew the about page would be such an important aspect. Anyway, I better get my about page done properly. Thanks for the tip. Cheers
Great article, thx! Maybe it’s time for follow up, what to do about high bounce rates?!
I know some site which do a job tracking bounce rate of my web pages.