If you log into your Google Analytics account, you will see a whole bunch of data about your blog's current traffic.

One of those details is your Bounce Rate.

Listen to This Episode

This is a number that many bloggers ignore. However, it gives you a lot of information about how your blog visitors are engaging with your content.

Bounce Rate is “the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.” – Wikipedia

Based on that definition, you can see how you would want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.

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How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

A lower bounce rate means that people are visiting multiple pages on your blog.

This will make them more likely to engage with your content, opt in to your email list, and yes – even purchase your products – and who doesn't want that?

That's why I decided to record this podcast episode, to help you do just that.

Btw, thank you to Marcus Kusi for recommending this topic on Facebook. If there's a topic you'd like to recommend, leave a comment here.

Inside This Episode

Lets say you notice that your Bounce Rate is higher than you'd like it to be (the average is 50%), the first thing you want to do is take inventory of your current situation.

You can do this right inside Google Analytics. Take for example my Biology blog, which has a Bounce Rate of 79.23% (ouch).

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Google Analytics

The next step is to drill down your site pages to see if there are any obvious problems staring you in the face. You can do that by going to “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages” in the left sidebar.

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Behavior > Site Content > All Pages

Then you can sort the content by Bounce Rate (by clicking on the Bounce Rate header) to see the pages with the highest bounce rates.

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Sorting the content by Bounce Rate

Visit those pages and see if anything stands out to you as a reason why people would just leave that page. Like in my situation, I went to the page below which is supposed to be a video and noticed that there wasn't a video.

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Page with missing video

Why would anyone want to stay on a page that didn't deliver on its promise? Sometimes there are obvious things like that that we can change and make a huge difference.

Once you've done that, there are a bunch of other things you can do to help reduce your bounce rate. Some ideas are:

  • Know what your audience wants and give it to them
  • Create more high value content
  • Stay on topic – deliver on expectations.
  • Link between your posts consistently
  • Plan your content in a logical sequence
  • Make content easier to read
  • Have clear navigation. Reorganize to make more helpful
  • Reduce the number of ads
  • Make sure your site loads quickly

But of course, there's a lot more too it than just that, which is why you're going to click play and listen to the episode 🙂

Enjoy!

Resources Mentioned

Transcript

Some people prefer to read along with the podcast episode. Others actually prefer to read than listen. If you are one of those people, not to worry. I’ve got a transcript right here for you 🙂

Click here to download transcript.

About The Podcast

Learning With Leslie

Learning With Leslie is a podcast dedicated to helping you build a business around a blog. No, not one of those blogs that will fall by the wayside when Google has a mood swing, but one that will thrive no matter what gets thrown at it.

I share tips and strategies that I’ve learnt building blogs since 2008 and interview experts who are knowledgable about various aspects of blogging so that we can learn from their experiences.

If you’re a blogger, thinking about becoming a blogger (pun intended) or are not even sure if blogging is right for you, go ahead and tune in to see what this blogging thing is all about.

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About the Author Leslie Samuel


Leslie Samuel a business coach for high-performing entrepreneurs. As the host of the Leslie Samuel Show, he teaches how to build an online business. "Changing the world one post at a time” is the mission he strives towards. As a former university professor, he has a passion for education. He's the founder of Interactive Biology, a blog and YouTube channel dedicated to making biology fun for students and teachers. As the head of training for the Social Media Marketing Society, he helps social media marketers get the training they need to stay on the leading edge of social media.

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