Your website’s bounce rate can be a fickle thing. By this point, you probably know that the lower your bounce rate, the better. You may be staring at your Google Analytics dashboard wondering how your blog stacks up against the rest.
So how high is too high, and is it really that important?
Bounce Rate Explained
What it measures is simple – the percentage of visitors that exit your website without engaging with your site. Google considers an engagement as at least one other page visited.
A high percentage – say, 80% for example – tells you that 80% of your website traffic found your content and decided to leave without taking any additional actions.
What Should Your Blog’s Bounce Rate Be?
A website’s bounce rate can vary on the niche of your content and how you approach your user experience. A good rule of thumb is to have a higher percentage of people engaged than bouncing. When content is the sole purpose of your site, make sure you content is quality.
Is a Low Bounce Rate Really That Important?
In most cases yes and in some cases, no. It can vary on what kind of blog you’re running, and what your personal goals are with your content.
One benefit of a low bounce rate is that it tells Google that visitors are engaged in your site, which helps your organic rankings. Plus, it reflects that you’re blog is performing at tip-top shape. In general, it will continue to tell you where you can make improvements.
Let’s talk about why this is important for a second. Say you’re a fashion blogger, and you make commissions from affiliate links on your website. You may not care if people land on a blog post and immediately click a link. But consider this – search engines see that people do not spend any time browsing the site and exit through your affiliate link almost immediately. Therefore,
You can look at bounce rate as a whole, or on a page-by-page basis. You might find that certain topics you write about have a low bounce rate and others are higher. Don’t be afraid to dive in to the data and use that knowledge to your advantage!
How Can You Improve Your Score.
Here’s a few things you can do to improve a high bounce rate:
- Use relevant post meta. When your article is shared on social media – is it relaying an accurate photo, title, and description? If you aren’t sure, try testing how your post looks when it’s shared with the Facebook Sharing Debugging Tool.
- Highlight related content. Featuring related topics at the end of an article may prompt a website visitor to keep reading. The point here is to focus on making sure the content is high-quality and related the the existing topic in some way.
- Adding internal links. It’s a great practice to add links within your article to other blog posts when it makes sense to do so. For example, a food blogger talking about a dessert recipe may refer to a great dinner recipe they previously discussed that pairs perfectly. Then, conveniently add a link to that text so it’s convenient for the reader to access that content as well.
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