I’ve recently have been talking to Rob Campbell, a great online marketer and SEO expert about websites, startups and other things… one of them being a website’s bounce rate. Rob Campbell has created multiple websites (one called Lenzr.com which is a photography contest website where advertisers sponsor prizes) and marketed numerous clients across the internet. More notably, he marketed a website called, MyCellMyTerms.com which is a company aiming to get you the best cell phone package possible.
The reason I mention this one in particular is because they are going to be on the October 21st episode of Dragon’s Den (The Canadian show that Shark Tank eventually copied) which is going to be really cool to see. I really like that program – seeing great startup ideas and terrible ones all in the same show… Genius!
Anyhow, He told me that he had heard, “anything over 80% in terms of a bounce rate will begin to affect your search engine rankings.” With this in mind, I created this post to help any blogger with this problem reduce their bounce rate for optimal placement in the search engines.
What is a “Bounce Rate”?
Bounce rate is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. – Wikipedia
In terms of blogs, this means people that find your website via search engines, twitter, backlinks, etc and visit only one page before moving on to another website.
What is the Ideal Bounce Rate?
Ideally, a 0% bounce rate is perfect… Although, as we all know, nothing is perfect. Under 50% is a good goal to shoot for although any blogger will notice: It’s not that easy to get that second click.
The entire concept comes from the search engines idea of a “usable” website. The smaller the bounce rate, the easier the site is to use, which is what they want to reflect in their results. Why not serve a simple website to a user looking for a topic of interest than a website that is full of links and ads?
The Problem for Blogs in particular:
The very nature of what they write is social, asking to be added to a user’s favorites on various social networking websites and linking to other websites that are of similar interest.
7 Ways to Reduce a Blog Bounce Rate:
- Install YARPP on your blog to create a list of related posts at the end (or beginning) of your post in the similar category.
- Speed up your Wordpress blog and install WP Super Cache to make your blog load as quickly as possible.. giving the visitor less of a chance to click the back button.
- Use interesting images at the start of your articles to spark a user’s interest in your content.
- Make sure your blog is simple, easy to read and isn’t cluttered with unnecessary widgets and code.
- Calming and Neutral colours can be your best friend.. A LOUD blog can either make visitors love your site or hate it depending on their personal tastes.
- Create a “Most Popular” articles section on your sidebar and be sure to make interesting titles to attract that second click.
- Making links open in a new window.. Keeps the visitor on your site and still allows you to link out to other websites without adding to your current bounce rate.
Conclusion:
Do you use a method not mentioned above to reduce bounce rate? What is your current bounce rate?
Related posts:
- Increasing Blog Traffic – Great Content Isn’t Enough
- Ultimate Mistake with an Easy Fix
- Brad’s 5 Ways To Make Your Post Titles Stand Out In A RSS Reader
- How To Create Your Own 4 Column Blog Footer – HTML & CSS Included
- Choose The Right Blog Hosting
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25 Comments
I don’t believe that bounce rate has much importance when calculating your search engine rankings, if any, at all.
The way I see it, there’s only two ways google can know your bounce rate:
1) If the user clicks back to the search results page, instead of closing the browser, follows an outgoing link or enters a new url / picks one from bookmarks.
2) If the website entered is using google analytics or another analytics software that google has their snout into.
But even if that’s the case, I think bounce rate can only be used to “rate your success” in certain industries – and especially with users from search engines the bounce rate is probably going to be higher, cause the search engine will direct the searcher to the exact page with the content they were looking for. If they found the answer to their question (or the content they’re looking for), they would probably leave the site anyway, as they were satisfied and don’t have to search the site for more information.
So it’s not really fair to punish (lower search engine rankings) for a site that offers a solution to a problem, because they offer the solution that the searcher was looking for.
But it’s a mix of attributes. Not even “time spent on site” is useful in all cases. A site with a 3000 word article on how to make pigs fly is bound to have a higher “time spent on site” than a 50 word article that explains people how to turn off their computer.
You forgot to mention the Google Toolbar that checks the pagerank of each website they visit.
The point I was trying to make was the fact that they would rather have the solution on a cleaner website that entices the user to interact, rather than just a site that has links to a whole load of different websites, leading them away from the original article.
Even over 80% BEGINS to affect your search engine rankings.. not completely destroy them.
Good point about the time spent on site.. if your really to the point, the time will be less than a person who fluffs up their content with useless information!
That’s true – there’s the google toolbar also. But even that, is not on every browser out there – I know, it’s not in any of my browsers at least, that’s for sure
Haha. I know, its like they know your every move
I wonder how Google Chrome users feel!
I believe bounce rate is part of usability component
the older the web gets, the more important usability is
SERPS want to serve up only high quality solutions
but how do they measure quality? bounce rate
Rob Campbell´s last blog ..Smojoe Builds a Blog for WarrantyElephant, a Warranty Expiry Reminder Service
Your point reflects the way I now see bounce rate as well. It only makes sense to show the most relevant and usable website to the visitor, that way the search engines appear more professional in the results they serve.
It was great meeting you, Rob.
i didn’t use any methods, because i not even care what is bounce rate, thank for head up I may be care more about it.. i wonder is it put link to other resource i mean not from our own blog can result to higher bounce rate?
thank for this great post..
If the people don’t click other links before clicking off your website then yes, you will be creating a higher bounce rate.
Do you think a bounce rate of 48% is ok?
Rian´s last blog ..Twitter is Useless for SEO
I think that’s a great bounce rate – Do your best to keep it there!
GREAT way to lower bounce rate is to get direct and search engine traffic.
-Mike
Free Arcade Games´s last blog ..Hey Wizard
I completely agree… Plugins like “Related Posts” and “Popular Articles” are great for capturing first time users.
I don’t think that it’s that big of a deal. People are coming to your site, regardless.
They can be on there 4 hours or .4 seconds and it’s still a visitor.
(Also, I thought Bounce Rate meant the same people coming back. I’ve learned something today.)
This is getting into an entirely different issue regarding visitor quality… Digg users come to your site for under 5 minutes and convert terribly. These don’t really accomplish anything than straining your server and giving you downtime.
This article was meant to get people thinking about that second click. Glad you learned something
You kinda said it with the tips, but the above the fold (what visitor sees without scrolling down) is the first step and thus, more important. The blog header must be “attractive”, clear navigation must be there and clear path should be obvious for the new visitor to follow. Great headlines help to get the visitor to actually read what’s on the page and then things like related posts, top posts and other goodness will kick in.
It’s also worth mentioning that regular readers, subscribers and such tend to push bounce rate up, as they might just come for your latest post and leave afterwards. So it’s also worth to engage those visitors in discussion on blog comments and use internal linking to provide additional information from older articles even the regulars might’ve not read yet.
Antti Kokkonen´s last blog ..Analyzing the State of the Blogosphere 2009
Hi Antti,
I agree about the post title – It plays a major role in keeping a visitor interested in the content.. I also like to include a picture below it to introduce the thought of the post. This goes a little further to make sure you capture the first time visitor’s attention.
As well as for your second thought, the regular readers might also come back if you push to have them “Subscribe to Comments” or better yet, create a separate comments RSS Feed.
Our bounce rate hovers around 50%. I just checked our stats and last month was 59%.
I suppose bounce rate could affect your SEO a little, but in general the way Google figures out how relevant your blog, posts, or site is typically is done through PageRank. And PageRank relies heavily on the number of relevant high quality inbound links.
To help reduce bounce rate, be sure to also “Give someone something to do” (i.e. click here next). I think most of your points hinted at doing that but to put it simply, that’s what you need to do to lower your bounce rate.
Also, watching your Visitor Loyalty in Google Analytics is a great way at helping your decrease your bounce rate. Here’s a great video talking about that.
John Hoff – WP Blog ´s last blog ..Increase Your WordPress Blog’s Security By Running It Through SSL
John – That’s fantastic. You really have some great content on your blog, I’m not surprised that it is so low.
I think that quality back links from other websites in your niche are really important, but I think that bounce rate is going to start playing a larger role in determining the relevance to a user’s query. With close to 100 billion webpages being indexed by Google, they are going to want to get the highest quality content and sift out the difficult to read articles.
Thanks for the video… I shall be watching it now.
Hey Brad. I can definitely see Bounce Rate as being a more important metric for Google, the challenge for them, however, is knowing what every website’s bounce rate is.
Without them adding code to your web pages (like Google Analytics), they’ll need a way to record that data. For example, how would they know the bounce rate of my family photo’s blog which contains no statistical javascript or anything?
In addition to that, they’d need to know which visits were my own visits to my own website. A guy like me who likes to toy with my blog is constantly clicking on links on my own site which could give false readings of bounce rate unless my IP address was filtered.
But how would Google know which IP address every website owner is coming from?
I agree, bounce rate might play a more important role in the serps, but there are definitely some bumps in the road which need to be addressed I believe.
John Hoff – WP Blog´s last blog ..Increase Your WordPress Blog’s Security By Running It Through SSL
You make some very valid points here – I do agree that it needs some “paving”
The only thing I could think of was search engine traffic (without analytics installed):
1) Visitor clicks on your blog through an article, then does another search by either pushing back or typing it in a toolbar.
2) Visitor clicks on your blog article and then clicks on another website with the script installed, checking the referrer of the site.
Hi there,
I am really impressed with the ways to reduce the bounce rate of the blog.If pages views increases then bounce rate can be reduced.YAARP and popular posts, random posts can do the best job for bounce rate reducing.
Surender sharma´s last blog ..The Homework Before Launching Your New Blog
Thanks For the Good Tips. They are really useful.
Amal Roy´s last blog ..How to Get a Valid IMEI Number For Mobile Phones in India
Content is the most important. I have blog that have 40% bounce rate ~ http://PrettyGirl2u.com but own blog have above 70%.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
Although its an interesting info about the bounce rate, it was somehow another thing to think about. So much of technical stuff goes on behind the scences that we are not aware of. How many things do we have to consider just to build a site and drive traffic to it?
Thanks for the info. Learning alot here.
Did the first 2 steps. But the most important still the content.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
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