Improve Your Bounce Rate And Make Visitors Stay!!
You don’t want visitors to stop by and then bounce? That’s what you call a high bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who stop by your site and leave after viewing just one page. So what is a good bounce rate anyway? A high bounce can impact your SEO and ultimately your search engine rankings. Getting visitors to your website is only half the battle. Entice your readers to stay a little while longer and improve your bounce rate!
What’s A Good Bounce Rate?
- Over 80 percent is very bad
- 70-80 percent is bad
- 50-70 percent is average
- 30-50 percent is excellent
- 20 percent or less is either beyond amazing or a tracking error
Typically, an excellent bounce rate is between 30 and 40 percent. However, the average bounce rate hovers somewhere between 50 and 70 percent. Most blogs have a bounce rate between 60 and 70 percent. Anything over 70 percent and you probably want to these steps to improve your rate. So, what is a good bounce rate for bloggers? I would say aim for 55 percent or lower, but if you can manage to stay below 65 percent you’re doing good!
How Do You Find Out Your Bounce Rate?
Curious what your bounce rate is? It’s easy to track your bounce rate through Google Analytics. In your overview report, you’ll see the bounce rate metric. That will show your overall bounce rate percentage. You can also view the bounce rate for individual posts and pages by visiting Insights – Reports and then Publishers. You’ll be able to check out the bounce rate for your top landing pages.
How Do You Lower Your Bounce Rate?
10 Steps To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Step 1 – Provide quality content. Teaching your readers something is a great way to encourage them to explore your site. Visitors don’t want loads of hype, they want to learn and increase their knowledge of your product or industry so they can make an informed decision.
Step 2 – Keep the navigation simple. Navigation links should be large and clearly labeled. Have you ever been to a cultural restaurant but couldn’t tell the men’s restroom from the women’s? While you may think themed titles are cute, your visitors may become confused and end up leaving your website. If in doubt, always go with the more common title.
Include Internal Links and Related Posts Like Here:
Step 3 – Always include internal links within your posts. This encourages those click throughs to other posts. Also make sure your readers have access to related posts at the bottom of each post. This is the best way to get your visitors to check out other pages.
Step 4 – Keep your content updated. Try to update times, dates, and news articles as much as possible. You don’t want your website to sound like it was published in the stone age do you? If you’re running an information based site than it is important to consistently add fresh and unique content.
Step 5 – Add infographics. Adding informative infographics keeps your readers intersted and engaged. This helps your visitors stay a little longer and check out what else your site has to offer.
Step 6 – Add lists. Everyone likes lists. List and describe product benefits. Your visitors don’t purchase features, they purchase the benefits that the product or service will provide for them. Is your product a time saver? Is it easier to use than most competing products? Make sure you describe how the product will make the visitors life more productive, more fun, easier, or better.
Step 7 – If you sell anything on your site, make sure your visitor knows their purchase is secure. More than one-half of all buyers won’t buy online because they’re afraid of getting scammed.
Step 8 – Make sure your informational content is accurate. Your visitors will stick around to read your message especially when you back it up with references and third party awards.
Step 9 – Test and tweak. Use tools like Google Analytics to determine what makes your visitors stick around and what makes them “bounce”. Then work on building on the good and dropping the bad.
Step 10 – Ask for site feedback. Provide your visitor with a way of leaving feedback for you and other readers.
Testimonials are a powerful tool because they give your product credibility from a third party. Testimonials can be a trust builder, especially if you provide a reference (phone number, email address, ect. ) for them to contact the user that gave the testimonial. Most of the time your visitors will not contact the person that gave the testimonial but it helps build trust and provides a more authentic feel.
Bonus Step- Improve your page speed. A very slow loading page can make people bounce before it even finishes loading. Make sure you upload a cache plugin and compress your images. Remove any plugins you’re not using and use a responsive theme.
Keep your visitors interested and informed to lower your bounce rate easily! Include internal links within your posts and related articles at the end. What’s your bounce rate? I’m typically in the 60s but always working to improve!
I love this so much! I know a lot of bloggers who never think about their bounce rate. I used to be one of them until I realized the power of understanding how people are interacting with your site.
I would suggest adding “Check your site speed”. People will abandon your page if it does not load quickly enough.
I think mine ranges from 30 to 60 % which I have always been pretty proud of! haha!
You have a very engaging site!! No wonder Your Bounce Rate is so low!!
I really enjoyed reading this. I have already worked on my blog this afternoon buidling internal links, I will see how it goes.
I need to keep an eye on my metrics. And yes i agree, bounce rate is a very important one. Thanks a lot for sharing.
This is helpful information for lowering your bounce rate. I’m trying to bring mine down at the moment.
I love step 9. I’m a numbers gal 😉 Right now, my bounce rate is in the 70%’s.
Aaaahhhh yes….the quality of content that we get to put out there strongly matters!
I always maintain a low bounce rate. Also, it is linked to page speed. Make sure your site is optimized.
Thanks for the tips Steph, they are very helpful for someone just starting out. My bounce rate is right and now I have some tips to follow to try to reduce it.
My bounce rate is in between 30-50!What a relief!Besides other tips are great.Bookmarked it!
Thank you for reminding me to check my bounce rate! I didn’t know how to check out until I saw this post!
This is helpful information for lowering the bounce rate. Mine stays pretty consistent.
great information! i always want to improve mine and looking for ways to do so. i def needed this so thank you!
These are great tips on how to help lower your bounce rate. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to utilizing some of these tips on my blog.
This is such an important metric. it is very important to keep things like this in mind so you know what areas you need to give a boost!
Checking your metrics and analytics is so important. Above all understanding your analytics is very important.
everyday i alwasy do check my bounce rate. a few months back, one of my facebook posts went viral, and that increased my bounce rate to 80%. so bad. right now, ive managed to lower it back to 50%. 🙂 it’s nice to check it from time to time.
I agree it is tricky one visitor your bounce is gone for a toss. I try to keep as minimum as possible…..I check it everyday so that I can keep tab on the same….it has increased lately to around 70% will have to bring down to 50% at least. Thanks for the post.
I have not checked my bounce rate lately. I am actually afraid to do so because I might not like the numbers I would see. Anyway, I will try your tips and I am sure this is going to be very beneficial for my stats.
Great tips! We should be really making quality content if we want the readers to stay for a long while. Time is gold, always.
Thanks for the tips, this would be very useful for the newbies. Such a nice blog.surekha~dreamingloud
I never really thought about tracking my bounce rate but I’m always looking to learn how to improve my blog. Great post!
Steph, all points are valid and very helpful to all who are getting familiarized with blogging and/or running their own site.
These SEO tips are a great help. I’ve found this article very skillfully written and well researched.
Thank you for this. I am not truly aware about bounce rates but read a lot of it. Now I should aim for the lower number.
I’ve never thought much about the bounce rate nor know a lot about it but this article surely helped me understand more. Thanks for the advice and for such informative article.
This is so enlighting. Especially for those just starting out. It’s a great way to monitor the blog .