Regardless of a blog’s niche, if people find your information relevant, engaging and your blog easy to navigate, they’ll click on another tab. I felt the need to write about this because I battled for as good as a year to finally feel at peace with my blog’s bounce rate and it would be nice to share knowledge acquired with you.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on one of your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website. It’s otherwise the percentage of visitors based on the time spent on your website. If the percentage is high e.g 80%, it means that 80% of guys that visited stayed on just one page (spent little time) and got off your site.

The more pages visited and time spent on your blog, the lower the bounce rate.

How Significant is Bounce Rate?

A page’s bounce rate is a ranking signal from Google. Bounce rate shows how users navigate from search results to your pages — and then ultimately — if they return to the search results to find another page that matches their query. It is Google’s way of seeing if visitors are finding your content satisfying for their searches. Read more at Ezoic Blog

How do you check your bounce rate?

There might be other ways but, one sure verified way to check your blog’s bounce rate is through Google Analytics. Visit the sign up page , set up an account using your google mail and follow the prompts. Your dashboard after set up should look like the picture below.

For the image above, the third overhead tab shows the bounce rate. It reads 82.68% which is really high. And that brings us to the question, “why is the bounce rate so high?”, “is it good as it is high?”, “what influences my blog’s bounce rate? ”

Bounce rate is affected by quite a number of things;

1. Blog Niche: What is your blog about? News, food, fashion, insurance, entertainment?
We have millions of people in the world and these people are interested in different things. Take for illustration, if the number of folks interested in getting information related to entertainment outweighs those interested in food.

A food blogger like me might find that a large number of visitors only visit a page (that page they need at the time) and walk away. While for the entertainment blogger, many people read this entertainment post and are willing or excited to read another. What this implies is that, even as you read on about bounce rate, do not absolutely judge yourself for not having your desired bounce rates. It’s not all about you.

2. Depth, Relevance and Energy of Information:

This is the other side of the niche coin. You’re dealing with humans (and maybe a few robots) and people love depth, they love energy and love to get what they expect when they visit your blog. If they get any or all of these three things on your blog, they’ll be compelled to visit other pages. But if otherwise, they will just walk away. So, you have to put in that energy when you write. Do your homework, carry out research and give your readers depth and relevance!

3. Popups: Popups are crazy. They can be frustrating. Either in the form of ads or signup form. Visitors don’t really like to see this especially if it affects their access to the information they want.

As bloggers, we both understand that this is how we generate revenue. However, we can make the ads orderly and we’ll have our gig.

I used a mail provider through the year until recently when I decided it’s a no no more. Since I was subscribed to a free plan, I couldn’t use the best formats. The one I used often come up to cover the blog page and disturbs navigation. A visitor could be on a page trying to stabilize for too long and it might not work out. If the network is good, it behaves good otherwise, it throws tantrums. I witnessed it myself and figured it was crazy so, I removed it. I ditched it and signed up for mailchimp. Now my subscriber form is simply and quietly seated in the blog footer. I love what I have on my blog now. Navigation is way sweeter and bounce rate has reduced.

4. SEO and Readability: I can’t shout this out loud enough. People don’t like junks! Let the blunders and errors in your blog posts be minimal. If the readability is bad, SEO might bring you visitors but folks won’t read for too long before they piss off. You can add the yoast seo plugin to your blog to help you checkmate these two brothers in every post. I’ve been using it for a year now and it’s does some good stuffs.

If you work on the above points, you can be sure that your bounce rate will be as it ought to be.

One other thing I learnt this year is that you can signup on blog directories such as blogarama that can feed your posts to more audience. For traffic’s sake, please don’t sit down on one platform when you can signup and share your posts on many others. You’d be surprised at how much visits you’d get from these websites. Directories find your posts and index them in the appropriate categories such that when people visit, they can find your blog.

Do your blog some good by signing up on the right websites and using the best plugins. Keep blogging and winning. *winks and hugs*
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