5 Reasons to Lower Your Blog’s Bounce Rate

Did you know that lowering your blog’s bounce rate can get you more subscribers? Or that your Google page rank might be partially determined by your bounce rate?

Unlike regular or ecommerce websites, blogs tend to have higher bounce rates because of several reasons, including the nature of blogs (readers only find value from a single post), affiliate marketing tactics (encouraging users to click ads to external sites), and methods bloggers often use to promote their blogs (social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon). As such, bloggers tend to overlook the value of implementing tactics to reduce their blog’s bounce rate at all.

First, let’s cover the basics:

What is a Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is a percentage of visitors to your blog that “bounce” away to a different site before visiting a second page on your blog. The formula looks like this:

Bounce Rate = Total Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Visits

A visitor can bounce from your blog the following ways:

• Clicking a link to an external website
• Closing the window/tab for your blog
• Entering a new URL
• Clicking the back button to leave your blog
• Session timeout (30 minutes of staying on the first page and leaving the browser open on that page)

Why You Should Lower Your Bounce Rate

1. Visitors Will Consume More Content

You should focus on tactics to lower your blog’s bounce rate to keep visitors on your site and consuming more content. The more pages they look at, the more interested they will be to ultimately subscribe to your blog and come back for repeat visits. The lower your bounce rate, the more valuable and loyal readers your blog will inherently have.

2. Increase Viral Growth

The more content your visitors consume, the more likely they will be to share your content with their connections. This personal endorsement for your content can be more effective at bringing in traffic than some of the tactics to increase page rank, such as link sharing or buying.

3. Increase Engagement and Blog Comments

Once visitors read more content on your site and read other users’ comments, they will become more likely to comment themselves. And again, subscribers and repeat visitors will be more likely to comment on your posts.

4. Increase Conversions

The longer a visitors remains on your site, the more opportunities the visitor will have to click on those Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. Or perhaps you’ve written an eBook; the more interested a visitor is in your content, the more likely he will be to purchase that eBook to find out more. Additionally, getting a user to become a fan of your Facebook page through your Facebook Fan Box or follow you on Twitter is still a valuable conversion because of the free advertising opportunities later.

5. Improve Search Engine Rankings

It’s been speculated that your bounce rate can affect your search engine rankings. According to this article on Search Engine Land – Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor – a website’s ranking can be impacted by significant changes in bounce rate. Search engines like Google want high-quality sites to appear higher in their search results, so sites with a higher bounce rate might indicate low-quality content or a poor site experience. Again, this is a big MAYBE, but it’s still worth keeping in mind.

In a couple days, I’ll cover some ways you can improve bounce rate on your blog. Have you implemented any tactics on your blog to decrease your bounce rate?