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Want To Lower The Bounce Rate On Your Blog?

By lowering the bounce rate on your blog, it means that people are staying and sticking around longer than usual. Which allows them to check out what you have to offer and you can increase your chances of a subscription, sale or return visit. Today, I’m going to show you a screenshot from my Google Analytics account on my blog and then, you’re going to find out how you can also achieve the same results on your own blog.

First of all, as you can see from the screen capture of my Google Analyrics stats above – my bounce rate had a 95.22% improvement. The average time of stay on my site also increased an average of 35 seconds and I have about 8% less new visitors – which could mean that I have 8% more returning visitors to my site.

Also, my pageviews per visit increased from 1.76 last month to 3.37 – which naturally leads to an increase in my blog’s pageviews… from 2,530 to 5.373 pageviews. My visits also increased from 1,440 to 1,595 visits – I’ve had about an average of 10% more traffic to my blog. Which means that I didn’t lose out in the new visitors by having 8% less new visits.

So, all in all, I can say that this has been a good month for my blog!

What Is Required For An Increase In The Blog Stick Rate?

Alright, now that the analysing of the stats above is over. Let’s get into the real reasons why there was an increase in my blog’s stick rate. There are a few things to cover and you will learn 3 things in this article – first impressions by website design, relativity to search and use of multimedia.

To prove my point, on February 16, you can see in the image above that my bounce rate had a very sharp decline. If you want an idea of my site’s bounce rate, just connect the end of the green line to the start of the blue line and you will know the bounce rate for 2 months on my blog.

What happened on February 16? I used multimedia. There were 2 videos about memory techniques that I found interesting which I embedded into my blog. I then followed it up a post on the 17th of February with Ron White teaching his memory techniques. So this proved that with the simple use of multimedia and linking of 2 videos, visitors of my blog actually stayed to watch the videos and thus increase my stick rate – drastically lowering the bounce rate.

However, after that, I didn’t use a lot of videos – so how is it that I could maintain the low bounce rate?

I had a change in my blog theme – it wasn’t a very big change. I had merely changed the header from a textual header (one where the text represented my header) into a graphical one. That also increased the stick rate – and I’ve had countless people, ever since then, complimenting that I had a very nice looking blog. But previously, no one ever did! A simple change in the header from a textual one to a graphical one proved to help a lot!

This is due to the first impression I left with website design.

If you want people to stick around longer, be sure to have a good header graphic designed for you – if you can’t do it yourself quickly. Also, in your blog posts, take some effort and find a good graphic to insert. Most people tend to take the easy way out and simply blog with only text but by simply using images and inserting them in your blog posts, you can also significantly decrease of bounce rate on your blog.

(I do remember blogs where I stuck around purely just because the header graphic was way too cool.)

The last point is relativity to search.

Most people who visited my site came from the search engines and they came because what I offered on my site was what they were looking for. This is important because many people tend to blog aimlessly and expect that the search engines will naturally pick up what they are blogging.

This is a strategy which I picked up from article marketing and applied on my blog articles. By creating articles on my blog which people are searching for, they tend to stick around longer to read what they’ve been searching for online.

UPDATE: In this article, I only talked about the bounce rate of my site. Click here to find out how to increase your average time on site and the average pages per visit.

Tagged with: blog

Filed under: Blogging

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