WWMD: Reduce Bounce Rate
- Filed under: WWMD
Welcome to another edition of Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do (WWMD). For this weekend, you must reduce your blog’s bounce rate.
Let’s say you’ve paid $100 to get 400 new visitors to your blog and 200 of them left without doing anything. How do you feel about that? Even if you’re getting free traffic, you should be worrying about reducing your bounce rate. You could be losing those visitors forever.
What is a bounce rate?
Basically, if your blog has a 50% bounce rate then it means 1 out of 2 people left your blog without visiting another page. Yes, they simply left without clicking on one single link.
By the way, anything higher than zero percent is unacceptable. You should always work on reducing the bounce rate.
How do you reduce the bounce rate?
First, let me share my bounce rate statistics.
- July: 52.10%
- August: 50.17%
- September: 48.36% (so far)
Since July, Wpdesigner’s bounce rate went down 3.74 percent. So now you know, it’s possible. Keep reading to find out how I’m doing it.
Before you can reduce it, you need to know what affects it. The main factor is targeted traffic. If you’re not getting targeted traffic then people are leaving your blog because it isn’t relevant to what they’ve searched for.
Targeted traffic alone depends on several factors. But basically, it’s going to be hard to get targeted traffic if your blog covers a wide range of topics.
If your blog doesn’t cover many topics at all and you’ve done a good job with sticking to your niche then maybe you need to:
- make it look the part. How do you feel about a technology blog looking like a food blog?
- sprinkle your keywords throughout your blog, in the blog title, description, post titles, content, categories, and sidebar titles.
- get other blogs to link to you using the keywords that you want them to use.
There are many other factors that can affect your bounce rate. For examples: Is your blog’s too text or graphic heavy? Do you run pop-up ads? Is your best content visible?
Other ways to reduce bounce rate
Design wise, you should make sure your blog is balanced, if not well-balanced. Most of the times, blogs are text heavy. Text heavy pages don’t capture the visitors’ attention and that’s a problem.
To the left of this paragraph is a side-by-side comparison of the before and after of Wpdesigner. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding a relevant image to each new blog post. You should do the same. On the other hand, I’m aware that not every blog design or WordPress theme allows room for an image with every post on the front page.
That’s okay, but you’ll need to make sure that your design or WordPress theme has enough graphics and / or icons to balance out your text heavy front page.
Beside using more images in the blog posts, I’ve also redesigned Wpdesigner to put the best content forward.
Ideally, you should optimize every single page of your blog to reduce the overall bounce rate. But for this weekend, focus on the front page.
I completely attest your opinion about adding images to your posts. I have seen that the time spent on the site surely increases, in my own experience. What image does is breaks your text in chunks and makes it more appealing to eyes of a a casual visitor and arouses interest that wouldnt have been there without the images…
That’s an awesome post SP. That’s awesome and it really opened up my eyes to the whole Bounce Rate thing. Thanks!
I have found that StumbleUpon traffic has just about the lowest bounce rate compared to nearly any other referrer. One more reason to Stumble stuff you like.
How do you go about calculating your bounce rate?
I wish my blog had a design and feel that people could visit, automatically tell the subject matter of the site and form some sort of positive opinion about whatever it is they’re about to read just due to the quality presentation of material. I guess I’ll have to hire a good designer for that to take place because all the themes out there look so bland and generic.
I fully agree with adding images to your blog posts. There’s little more off-putting than tightly packed text blocks with no visual hook.
For me, it makes such a difference to have relevant imagery.
Google Analytics calculates bounce rate and provides you with lots of fancy graphs and other stats to drool over. There’s also a WP plugin for Google Analytics that makes implementation a breeze.
@Chris - I use Google Analytics to track bounce rate
Great tips! I’ve done the same thing to most of my post, sometimes I blog some post came out from digg and I’ll add on relevant pics into it. To me, I dont really prefer a post with long + tight text since I dont like to read..
[…] Well, actually I found an advise from Small Potato at WpDesigner.com in this post about reducing bounce rate of your blog. […]
The more niche your website, the lower the bounce rate - something people tend to forget. I have one client who’s weekly bounce rate ranges from about 43% (after doing an e-mail campaign) to 54% during normal operations. Obviously after targeting her “preferred” customer type - the rate will go down. Leads from referral sites average about 26%, and from search engines about 50-70% depending upon search term. Stumble Upon as mentioned is down near 18%.
I have another client who has been on the web for 7+ years, in a “very” niche market and he averages 140+ visitors a day, and about a 17% bounce rate overall - which is the lowest I’ve ever seen for a non-interanet site.
So key thing, besides adding images, breaking apart text, etc. - be relevant.
I’ve noticed a low bounce rate from SU as well, but I’ve also noticed that, on pages that I’ve promoted through SU, I’m seeing strange navigation patterns in Google Analytics: 40% of visits to the page came from the page itself, and 40% of next pages were also the page itself. I’m not seeing this pattern with pages I don’t promote on SU, which makes me curious. SU is clearly driving a ton of traffic to my site; it’s just not clear that the traffic is actually generating the low bounce rate that GA shows.
I agree with adding images! However, you should always be careful to balance out the content! You need to find a good level of content vs imagery, people need to find what they are looking, without having to maneuver through cluttered ads and images.
Analytics is a great way to understand how the inner workings of your page behaves.
I found a great plugin, all in one seo >>> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/… , it helps add/build better meta tags, keywords, descriptions, title, etc for all your posts and pages. Since I installed it on a few of my client sites there has been a steady progress up the search engine and more unique visitors.
I hope that helps!
Good post.. these seems like doable tactics for combating the High bounce rate.
My bounce rate was over 70%, so I decided to create a very attractive link on the center of the page, with everything else leading up to and directing attention to this link. . It seemed to work a bit, because my bounce rate dropped by about 10% overnight. Now what should I try next?