Be it a blog or an E-commerce Website, two factors which actually determine the popularity, and readership of your blog is Avg. time on Website and bounce rate. In this article, I will be focusing on factors which helps will help you to decrease down bounce rate of a blog. One of the biggest mis-conception is, bounce rate affect search engine ranking, and it’s not true, as confirmed by Matt Cutts. For a niche website, a higher bounce rate reflect bad user experience, and as a webmaster it’s our job to make sure user browse more pages on our blog. Here I’m sharing few factors, which will help you to lower down bounce rate of your blog.
Tips to Lower down Bounce rate of your blog
Internal-linking:
One of the most workable solution to lower down bounce rate is intelligent inter-linking. When ever you are writing a blog post, you should always link back to relevant article on your blog. This will help users to discover more content on your blog, and it will also help new readers to convert into subscribers. If you are using WordPress, you can use plugins like Insights, SEO Smart links to interlink your article. One practice that I usually follow is, when I publish a new article, I usually go and add new article links to old articles also. This serves two purpose:
- SEO advantage for more internal links
- Readers get more content to read on similar topic
Related posts:
Related posts is one of the oldest, and most popular technique to decrease down the bounce rate of your blog. Related post widget is usually placed after blog post, as when a reader is done reading an article, he will have more options to read. A related post widget act like call to action button for a blog. There are plugins like YARPP, Nrelate, Zemanta which helps you to quickly add related posts.
Open outbound link in new tab:
If you blog like me, where you add too many outbound links on your blog to give a better user-experienece, you should make all your outbound links open in new tab. If you use WordPress editor to add a hyperlink, you can simply select the option which says “Open link in a new tab”. Simple and easy. If not, there are WordPress plugins, which will do the task for you.
Popular posts in sidebar:
This is one of the least talked technique to lower down bounce rate. Most of the blogs I have seen, have a sidebar widget for popular posts or random posts. This practice is really useful for overall SEO of your Website. You can make a little change here to ensure your visitors get more material to read. You can make popular posts or random posts, populate depending upon the article a reader is reading. One thing which helped me a lot to lower down bounce rate by setting my popular and related post plugin, to show content based on category on tags of the post.
There are many other factors like your site navigation, your site loading speed which also helps in lowering down the bounce rate. According to me a niche blog should have a bounce rate of 40-50%, which is good. If you have a bounce rate over 70-75%, it’s time to work on your blog design, content optimization and make it user friendly. You can also create resource pages (Ex: WordPress Guide), this will work as a landing page, and will help you to make your visitor browse more pages on your blog.
Do let me know, if you use any other tips to lower down bounce rate of your blog? If you find this article useful, do consider sharing it on Facebook and Google plus.
Thanks for the share Harsh!!
Thanks for dropping by and for your comment Josh :)
Adding related posts is an good idea and most of the sites has bounce rate between, 75% to 50%. Is the method will help to decrease the bounce rate.
Nice article Harsh. Yes, I do agree that interlinking the posts with relevant articles will obviously get the readers read more on our blogs, which will definitely result into low bounce rate. Apart from that, I want to include that a fast site’s bounce rate is always low, so we can simply optimize our blogs for fast performance, and decrease the bounce rate accordingly.
Hi Harsh.
Excited to see your article over Business2Community.
I totally agree with you on this post. And I think Zementa serves better in the case of Related Posts widget.
Isn’t talking about an old blog post you wrote while writing worth it? :)
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Related posts below blog posts in any format works..if colors and presentation is done in the right way to improve CTR… Specially for news kinda blog..
For a blog like Business2community niche, ShoutMeLoud, quicksprout.. It’s a good idea to add links within the post, since users are more attentive towards content itself..!! I hope this answers your question too..
One have to apply strategy based on their audience base and niche..!!
Matt Cutts in another video also said that sometines its good to hv a high bounce rate
For eg: someone comes on your website and reads 6 different pages. Now this might reduce your bounce rate but this may also mean that the reader had to browse through 6 different pages to find what he was actually looking for.
So, in some circumstances a high bouce rate may also be good which may give a sign that the user found what he was looking for in the first page itself and he didnt find the need to browse through different pages… But in this case, other factors like the time spent on page and user behavior after leaving that page would matter a lot…