I recently had to perform an SEO analysis on a website that had a high bounce rate and the main question of the owner was “why such a high bounce rate, if I have good quality content?”. I looked at the text content from the website and he was right: lots of good information but extremely high bounce rate.
How to look at it in Google Analytics Reports
When you’re checking the bounce rate you should also look at it together with time on site. Only when you’ll have a high bounce rate and almost zero seconds time on site you should think that your content is not relevant to what the reader was searching for. And only then you should try and find out the sources of traffic for that page and better understand the bounce rate.
But if you have high bounce rate and a couple of minutes time on site then this means the content was relevant to what the readers were looking but they didn’t had a good reason to navigate further. This is a common issue to blogs because many articles are created as standalone pages. This was the case of the website I analyzed: lots of good content with no natural links placed in text to point to other topic related articles.
Suggestions to improve bounce rate
When you plan your articles don’t just think of standalone articles: try and plan groups of articles. Start with the main one that speaks about a problem in general terms and from there go for more specific articles. Link between articles in a natural way and use descriptive anchor text. Don’t just place links on words like “here”.
If someone sees the link for the first time, without reading your article he should already have a general idea about what the next page would be.
Your turn
What do you think of this? Did you find this information on bounce rate useful? Share your experience and please consider subscribing to my blog.
Thanks Toma this article has great suggestions and I like the fact that you linked it to other material that goes into greater depth.
Steve
A plug-in for WordPress called “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” will also list other articles/blogs on the topic at the bottom of the post with links to the other articles. So this is another way to get readers to go to other pages.
Thank you Steve for your comment and observation. Appreciated!
Thank you Jeannette for the plugin suggestion. I’m also using something similar but for me it didn’t helped that much. I find that links placed inside text content can help a lot more.
Toma;
Great article with much useful advice. I would add just one thought to the mix: Google appears these days to be using the Bounce Rate, or BR, to influence where it lists your site on its Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS. Doesn’t seem fair in some ways, but it is in most respects (from Google’s perspective), so we had better all get used to this. For those of with active blogs, the BR is, as Toma said, usually higher because people come to read a post and leave. So you must do something about it as Toma and Jeanette suggest.
We use a combination of three ideas to help reduce BR.
1) Point people to the top index instead of to the post itself. You can only use this one if the post you are bringing to their attention is near the top of the index, of course. If it’s below “the fold”, then we…
2) Point them to a newly created Landing Page which houses a few other related posts. Better than using YARP (the plugin Jeannette mentioned), as on this page you can cram a bunch of keywords to enhance your SEO acore while gathering the posts to form a series,
3) Placing links on all of our posts to try and link people into content on the rest of the site as Toma suggested.
Hope this helps.
Toma;
By the way, in case you would all like to see an example of this, we just posted the first in a new series we’re writing called, “SEO Campaign Management: Survival Guide”. This first post is called, “Designing an SEO-friendly website from the ground up”. You can see how it all works by visiting: http://bit.ly/SEOSurvival
Thank you Eric for your comment. I truly appreciate your time to share your opinions with us. Great suggestions.
I’ve seen a video with Matt Cutts from Google and he received a question about the influence of any Google Analytic metric on rankings. The answer was that Google doesn’t uses any of the website’s metrics to influence its rankings.
Will check out the link you provided for sure.
Thanks again!
Toma and Eric — thanks for your commenst on YARRP. I know it’s essential to have links within your blog. I’m trying to do more of that, but it needs to be relevant to the content.
I am working on the SEO of a website that has a high bounce rate but over 1 minute avg. time on site. How do external links affect the bounce rate? The site has prominent links to manufacturer websites on the home page. Should I be worried about a high bounce rate on this site?