Bounce Rate: Definition and its Importance in Blogging

Any newbie blogger should be aware of the importance of bounce rate and its role in blogging. If a blogger wishes to build good traffic base, not only of new but recurrent traffic, it is necessary to improve bounce rate.

Definition of Bounce Rate

While browsing websites, many visitors view a certain page. When they click on any link,, if any is mentioned on that post, and go to another page, the time spent on viewing and leaving the page is termed as Bounce Rate.

If there is no external link, the reader will click the X mark on the browser, and thus, the bounce rate is calculated on the time spent in viewing the page and exiting. The percentage of user visit and engagement is calculated to show how a single user engages with any web page.

How to Measure Bounce Rate of a Website?

Bounce Rate is calculated on the number of viewers visiting a specific blog post followed by the number of pages visited. When any user completes viewing a page of your website and exits, then it is called exit rate.

Importance of Bounce Rate in Blogging

Bounce rate is important for a blogger because advertisers often check the bounce rate of a website to measure the blog’s popularity and offer an advertisement deal.
1) High Bounce Rate
A user may visit a webpage and go to another page without viewing the first page fully, such as spending just few seconds on it. This will indicate the page as poor quality.

Bad pages have a high bounce rate but it doesn’t mean that the content is of poor quality. Same case happens with blog posts. It is not enough to create content, you have to ensure visitors remain on the page for long.
2) Low Bounce Rate
The exact opposite is going to occur in terms of low bounce rate. On the basis of the content of the blog posts, bounce rates varies. Blog posts show higher bounce rates than product posts. This is because when it comes to viewing products, users engage themselves more in it than blogs. Users are active in shopping sites or online stores so the bounce rates are low.

A user may view blog posts to read content and exit from that page. These pages do not contain other links, so users have no other option but to get out of the page. So, the bounce rate of such a page is 80% to 100%.
3) Analyzing Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is measured in percentage for any website. So, when the bounce rate percentage is 40 to 50 then it is taken as average. When the rate increases to 60% or more, then it is higher than average. A percentage below 40% is a premium page. It comes under excellent position.

Qualitative pages tend to increase the rankings of a website. You have to be very careful while analyzing your website’s bounce rate. This is because when a page has high bounce rates, either your blog posts are not liked by users or the webpage needs redesigning such as better on-page SEO, better loading speed, good display and more.

Use Google Analytics to keep track on bounce rate. If you are running a simple blog, and not selling any product or service, you need to keep the blog bounce rate under 50%.

How to Check and Improve Website Bounce Rate?

There are reasons behind understanding bounce rate of your website pages.  Benefits from knowing the bounce rate of your site are:

Way 1:

If you require average or low bounce rate, then you should pay attention to your content published in your pages. Are the pages unique, catchy or strong to hold a visitor for a long time to a page? Not only pages with a higher bounce rate, but pages with an average bounce rate should be taken into consideration. Pay particular attention to page loading speed with tools like tools.pingdom.com and Google Pagespeed Testing.

Way 2:

If some elements in a webpage are not up to mark then it might result in a high bounce rate. In order to get a good quality webpage, proper designing is strongly recommended. Focus on the theme and layout. Optimize every page such that it motivates the reader to take a certain action, such as build subscriber list or fill up query forms.

Way 3:

Create pages according to the likes and dislikes of a user. Analyse kinds of pages that hold users for a longer period of time. Look into existing Google Analytics report and see what kind of posts have lower bounce rate. Analyse those posts and emulate its features for high bounce rate posts.

Way 4:

Check marketing sources in similar websites which affect the bounce rate. Look into your competition blogs and analyse their performance factors using tools like Ahrefs.com and SimilarWeb.com. Again, try to incorporate methods employed by competition blogs on your website.

Way 5:

Choose those keywords which send maximum traffic because they are the organic ones and apt for your website. When users come to your blog through organic search results, there is a higher chance of improving bounce rate because the users are looking for particular information and thus, they are willing to spend time on a particular blog post, share it on social media and bookmark.

Keep these pointers in mind and improve your blog’s bounce rate.

Conclusion

Bounce rate is able to change the scenario of your website. It affects the rankings of a website and provides high traffic to the page. Low bounce rate increase the number of visitors to a page.

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