What Is a Bounce Rate and How to Improve It?

Posted on | September 11, 2009 | No Comments

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spettacolopuro/ / CC BY 2.0

What is that “bounce rate” in Google Analytics? A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that find your site, don’t like what they see and leave, without ever seeing any other pages.  Really, how could they?  However, think about it from their perspective.

It is most frustrating when searching for something in Google; I click on a site hoping that it would contain the information I am seeking.  When I get to the page, it isn’t what I was looking for and I go back to Google.  Is this happening when visitors get to your web pages or blog posts?  Do you have a high bounce rate?  What do you do about this?  Let me share some tips with you.

Writing the Page

When you write an article or blog post, ask yourself, “what is the purpose of this page and what will the reader get out of the content?”  Write your page with a goal in mind, your visitor’s goal that is.  Try to make content specific and not general, as well as covering one topic and not many.  The exception would be if the page were an introduction to other topics or a list of tips.

Writing the Page’s Title

With your visitor’s goal in mind, decide on a page title that would cover the following:

• Explain what the page is about
• Entice the visitor to click
• Explain how it would meet the need of the visitor

The hard part is getting all this information in a short 60-character sentence.  However, it is important to make it enticing and relevant to the page’s content.  In your website’s code, this will be in a meta title tag.

Writing the Page’s Description

A visitor will scan the titles on a search engine results page, and if not convinced by the titles will scan the descriptions.  The description will give you more space to outline the page’s purpose and benefits to the visitor.  Remember to keep the visitor’s goals in mind when constructing your description.  Like the title, it needs to be enticing and relevant to the page’s content.  In your website’s code, this will be a meta description tag.

A final tip: incorporate your page’s keywords into the title and description so that the visitors can find you in the search engines for those keywords.

Easy Links to Other Pages

A bounce rate increases because visitors leave your site without having seen any other pages, therefore it is important to provide easy links for the visitor to visit the rest of your site.  Provide these links within your content for them to find more information on the topic that was not included on the current page.

These tips will help you lower your bounce rate and help you get the visitors you want to your site.

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