Question: What is bounce rate?
Answer: Bounce rate is the amount of visitors who leave your website or blog, without viewing any other page.
That is, they stumbled on your homepage and then clicked away.
As a blogger, one of the things you must do daily is monitor and track your stats. By so doing, you would discover amazing insights into this issue.
In a nut shell, it’s better to have a bounce rate of 22% than 85%. I have been battling this issue since I started my blog few months ago. A decrease in bounce rate shows that you’re on the right track. Your content is amazing, engaging and your reader are eager to read more.
It means you’re delivering quality information. Your content is interesting, informative and full of action steps. When your bounce rate is on the high side, it portrays a crappy content, written for the search engines, with irrelevant backlinks and spun contents.
2. Who Are Your Target Audience
Before you can be able to reduce bounce rate and improve on your content, you must first determine who your target audience are.
You can’t possibly target every prospect out there. Your blog should be thinly focused on a particular topic so that you can master the thoughts and emotions running through your prospect’s vein.
So, determine who they are, what interests them, why they came to your blog in the first place and how urgent they need your solutions.
Get to know them. If you’re into internet marketing, what group of people are you targeting, is it the beginners, intermediate, bloggers or experts.
I can’t choose for you. You’ve got to make a decision and focus on it. Internet marketing is a lot profitable and easier when you narrow your marketing campaigns to a group of people, who share similar needs and wants.
Talking about bounce rate, your goal should be to Stop visitors from leaving your site/blog, and direct them to read more.
2. Write Interactive & Quality Content
It’s not enough to write quality contents (articles, press releases, posts), but you must make it sticky and interactive.
Interactive means you create the atmosphere where you readers are able to pause, and meditate on what your content says. You should engage your readers by asking open questions.
Once you are able to get them to think and conclude in their mind about a given topic, you’ve won their heart.
Your articles should be original, unique and interesting. That’s why it’s pretty difficult for people without a sense of humor to succeed with their write ups.
You should add hilarious quotes every now and then to your article.
That doesn’t mean you should overdo it, but as much as you can make them laugh. Everyone enjoys joke – well if you don’t enjoy one, wait until I write a subheading (don’t make people laugh).
3. Concentrate On What Google Analytics Provides
One good thing about Google analytics is that it’s so detailed. You don’t have to keep researching keywords every now and then and expert to rank highly on Google.
What you should do is to concentrate on what keywords and entrance sources on your analytics dashboard.
If you’ve not been using Google analytics, signup here. Add your website/blog and then copy their authentication code and paste within the <head> and </head>.
When you study your analytics thoroughly, you would observe that certain keywords have less bounce rate than others. What this means is that you should check the posts on these keywords and analyse the content.
You can go the extra mile to tweak this content the more, add your inner pages within this content, redirect readers to check out other stuffs you’ve got – your bounce rate is already on the right track.
When certain keywords perform well, target more of these keywords and her counterparts and you’ll get more traffic from organic search engine and engage your readers.
4. Syndicate Your Best Blog Posts
Another creative way to reduce bounce rate and increase your traffic is to publish an article on your best posts. This way, you get to link to the published web pages using anchor texts.
This makes it possible for readers to click through and check out your previous blog posts.
You know what? Your bounce rate is getting a touch, and would definitely reduce. The first time I checked my Google Analytics, my bounce rate was over 74% but today, it’s less than 50%. Thanks to Ana who shared some insights on managing bounce rates.
So an article on the “top 10 articles for August” and “50 Ways Twitter and Grow Your Business,” could be the turning point in engaging your readers. These type of contents also encourage sharing, and you SEO is triggered to send you more results. Google like anchor text links.
The above simple tips can help you reduce your bounce rate and get more targeted traffic from Google.
You should take action on them to see results. Share your experience with bounce rate in the comments area.