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What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics?
The Bounce Rate in Google Analytics is the percentage of all visits to your site in which readers viewed only one page and left (or bounced).
Some website owners, especially novice bloggers, confuse a bounce with the amount of time users spent on a single page. In Google Analytic terms, this is called Session Duration. Unfortunately, even experienced marketers often confuse these two concepts. I discovered that many tutorials are teaching how to keep visitors on a post rather than how to encourage them to browse other pages of your site after reading one.
While both issues are important for better ranking in Google and other search engines, today I’m going to talk about the Bounce Rate and NOT Session Duration. There are definitely common techniques to improve both, but how to motivate your visitors to read a single-page content is a topic for another post. Right now, let’s explore how to optimize your website in order to increase awareness of other content your blog offers and raise interest to surf more pages on your site.
Depending on the goals of your posts and the nature of your business, the high bounce rate in Google Analytics is not always a bad thing. The expert marketers suggest that an acceptable bounce rate per a content-driven website should be under 70%, yet the numbers over 55% indicate that optimization is required rather sooner than later.
Bounce Rate Benchmarks
Some of your blog posts might be designed to drive visitors away from your website. Thus, if someone landed on such a page through organic search, and left following your Call To Action, this person’s behavior will contribute to the higher bounce rate of your site. At the same time, this visitor who followed your CTA has contributed to the higher conversion rate of your site. That’s what you want even more than keeping him or her browsing through other posts on your blog. The high conversion rate will eventually lead to more profit from your blog.
However, you should keep the number of posts that intend your audience to leave after reading it, to the minimal. Google takes your Bounce Rate into consideration among many other factors when determining how to rank your site. The higher your overall site rank is, the higher your individual posts rank and the more organic traffic you get to your blog. Isn’t that your ultimate goal?
There are many aspects that may affect your overall bounce rate. Of course, number 1 is the quality of your content. This is one of the common factors for both: session duration and bounce rate. But assuming that your content is amazing and average session duration counts in minutes, what else can be improved on your site to keep visitors interested in browsing other pages?
Let’s take a look at the following section.
18 Tips to Improve Bounce Rate.
- Write quality and engaging content.
Well organized and presented interesting and valuable information will not only keep your readers’ attention on one page but will also trigger curiosity to browse other material on your website.- Keep paragraphs short
- Use numbered and bulleted lists
- Use images illustrating the content
- Including a relevant video is very beneficial
- Choose the keywords closely relevant to the content of your blog.
If users come to your blog via organic search channel and see that its content is not relevant to what they were looking for, they are going to click the browser’s Back button right away, thus reducing your average session duration and increasing your bounce rate.
Choosing well-defined and highly relevant keywords could be tricky as the same keywords can be used when searching for different types of information. Sometimes, using longer keyword phrases may improve your bounce rate. - Improve your page load speed by using Google PageSpeed plugin or even changing your hosting provider. You can use Pingdom to check your page loading time.
- Make sure that your blog is mobile-friendly.
Test your website with Mobile/ Responsive Web Design Tester extension for Google Chrome or with a similar tool. - Get rid of annoying pop-ups if you have any on your website.
- If traffic to your website is not huge, don’t display in your posts any 3rd-party ads such as Google AdSense. Unless thousands of people are visiting your site daily, these ads will earn you pennies, but they will distract readers and drive them away from the intended action proposed in your content.
- Include relevant internal links in your post content.
- Reduce the number of pages with the Calls to Action leading away from your website.
In affiliate marketing, you can write isolated posts (such as Product/ Service Review) with affiliate links that take visitors away from your site. Keep all other posts pointing to these Review pages rather than taking your readers directly to the product or service these posts are referring to. - Open external links in a separate tab or in a new window.
- Display popular posts excerpts in your sidebar and add related posts as a gallery link under each post.
If you are reading this post on the computer, look at my sidebar for an example. Having “About Author” snippet with a link to either full biography page or to the Contact page is helpful. I also included the introduction of 2 home-based business opportunities, which I’d like my visitors to learn about (internal links to Review pages on this site) and possibly join (external links are less obvious as they are “hidden” in the images; these links will open in a new tab)
Some WordPress themes offer an option to include Related Posts gallery at the bottom of each page. Either turn on this option or create your own gallery for each post using the WP Gallery Custom Links plugin.
- Don’t share pages with intentionally high bounce rates in social networks. Instead, share pages that have internal links to your “Review” posts. Articles, containing affiliate links and clear CTA to check your external promotions are only encreasing the Bounce Rate if they serve both as an entrance and an exit page. If a user landed on a different page, followed the link to the page containing your affiliate link, and exited from this new page following your CTA, he/she won’t contribute to increasing your Bounce Rate, and he/she will contribute to increasing your conversion rate – that’s exactly what you want.
- Make navigation of your site clear and simple.
Keep your Primary Menu flat: one line without long drop-down lists under each header. In WordPress, assign “Categories” to keep related posts together. You can use these Categories in your Menu. - You can also break down your longest posts into 2 or more pages with the “Continue Reading” button on the previous page.
- Link your images to internal pages or set links to none.
Sometimes, images are linked by default of your editor to their full-size media file. Make sure that all links in images are intentional. If you need to link your image to an external webpage or to its media file, open the destination page in a new tab as shown above. - Add “Back to Top” or “Home” button at the end of the posts if your Top Menu goes out of sight as users scroll down while reading your post.
- Keep your content fresh: update your old posts and add new ones frequently.
Do not delete outdated posts. Modify the content of an old post as much as needed, but keep under the same permalink, adjust the “Publish” date to the current date, and make sure that the time is in the past. - Make sure that your comment requests do not increase your site’s bounce rate.
If you’re participating in the comments exchange groups on Facebook or in other communities, ask your commentators to click on at least one other internal link after they read and commented on the post you provided a direct link to. Do the same when you comment on other bloggers’ posts.
Comments are supposed to increase user engagement, complement your SEO and boost your ranking in Google’s eyes.
At the same time, if commentators viewed only one post and left your website, they contributed to increasing your bounce rate and thus decreasing your rank.
By exchanging comments, we are trying to help each other succeed in our online businesses. While offering a helpful right hand, we don’t want our left hand to unintentionally impair the SEO figures. - Be sure that your own IP is filtered out in Google Analytics.
While writing and formating content, you may view your post on the website multiple times and leave. If your computer’s IP is not excluded, your own visits will contribute to increasing your site’s bounce rate. Set a filter in Google Analytics – so, that your own visits to your site do not negatively affect the statistics.
I made a short video for you explaining how to set up a filter in Google Analytics:
The Bottom Line…
In general, the high Bounce Rate value in Google Analytics negatively affects the overall rank of your website. However, it’s only one of the numerous factors that Google counts in when calculating the rank. Depending on your business needs, having a high Bounce Rate may actually indicate that you are doing the right thing.
Analyze your posts taking into consideration the tips offered above. See if there is room for improvement and fix the unintentional issues that you find. But please use the conventional wisdom. Do not go crazy trying to improve your Bounce Rate and at the same time jeopardizing the good stuff that works well.
Your end goal is to increase the rank, organic traffic to your site, and conversions. Whatever works – it’s all good! 🙂
Was this information helpful for you? What’s your current Bounce Rate? Please let me know in the comment area below. Then, come back and tell me if you were able to improve your site’s Bounce Rate using my advice.
And of course, feel free to browse around my posts. I hope you will contribute to lowering my blog’s bounce rate and not vice versa. Thank you!
If you’d like to learn all about Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, how to write quality content, how to analyze the performance of your blog, and also build and host your websites and have in one place all the tools you need for building a successful online business, please check out Wealthy Affiliate all-inclusive platform. Read about an advanced keyword research tool that is included in the WA Premium membership. (See “You May Also Like” gallery below)
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Hey Julia, thanks for the excellent article.
I am starting with site building, SEO, content writing, dropshipping and affiliate marketing.
Even though my pages exponentially grow into rankings (but it is still competitive niches and not bringing me the organic traffic I want, just yet), my bounce rate is one of the key factors I am trying to develop at the moment.
You just gave me a whole bunch of ideas on how to improve it, but mostly I think I need to optimize mobile mobility, optimize the in-page SEO adding a few internal links and relating posts manually one into the other and also improve the appearance of the website.
Well, thanks, and I hope to read again from you soon!
Hi Luiz,
I’m glad that my post was helpful to you. Relating posts manually is a good decision. At first, I relied on the theme’s option “Show Related Posts”. It didn’t do well. It seemed like it displayed random posts not even from the same category. When I started doing this work manually, my bounce rate went down significantly.
Good luck with your optimization,
~ Julia
Great blog post on the bounce rate for a website. I’ve been using a plugin called WP Zero Bounce, to aid with lowering the bounce rate on my site, and I have found it very useful. I have several tasks to work on over the next few months that will help improve my bounce rate.
Hi Nathan,
Thank you for sharing your own experience. I haven’t used the WP Zero Bounce plugin. I’ll check it out.
Wishing you great success,
~ Julia
After reading your post I had to go check my Google Analytics bounce rates and it says that it’s a 1.01% (-75.98) and I was wondering when you said that it’s best required to have it not more than 75%, which number does that reflect, the one in the parenthesis or the first one. This is all brand new information for me and I’m still a little confused and concerned about my bounce rate.
Hi Stephanie,
I was referring to the first number. The number in the parentheses indicates the change from the previous period. If you were viewing the statistics for the 7 days period (which is a default on Google Analytics Home page), then your previous week’s bounce rate was 76.99%, and during the last 7 days, it dropped from that number by 75.98% down to 1.01%.
How many visitors per day do you have on your website? Such a big drop could be due to your website being new and there are only a few people visiting it each day. Thus, if 8 people visited your site during the previous week, and 6 of them bounced (left the site after viewing one page), then your bounce rate would be 75%. And if the next week 4 visitors came to your site, and 1 of them bounced. Your bounce rate will be 25%, which would show as (-50%) improvement compared to the previous week. I made-up numbers in this example for easy calculation.
However, if hundreds of people are visiting your site daily, then 75.98% improvement is awesome, and you’ve done something wonderful during this past week to improve your bounce rate. Keep up a good job!
Thank you for reading and commenting. I hope my answer was helpful.
~ Julia
Hello Julia,
Thanks for this great article about the bounce rate in Google analytics. Because of this information, I got to know the difference between bounce rate and session duration. I have been confusing the two, but now I can differentiate between them. I also got to know how to improve on the bounce rate and am soon starting to use these tips. Thanks very much for this article. Keep sharing.
Hello Mugalu,
I’m happy to be of help. When you start working on your bounce rate optimization, please feel free to come back and ask any questions you may have.
Good luck,
~ Julia
Oh my, this’s not a bad one at all.
I am very impressed by what you have written here. I didn’t know before you made this post what the bounce rate meant but now I see how the whole thing works and I really like it too. This is something everyone should have with their website. Since I am new to site creation, I will put this all in mind and make sure that I start with the tips you gave. It would be a big plus to take the bounce rates into consideration right from the start.
Thanks.
Hi John,
Thanks for the comment. While it is a good idea to keep these tips in mind from the very beginning of your content creation, your bounce rate wouldn’t mean much until you’ll see a meaningful size of daily traffic on your site.
Wishing you great success in your online venture.
~ Julia