How Bounce Rate Is Calculated and Tips To Decrease It

Bounce rate is a very important metric for SEO. High bounce rate affects the SEO of your blog. Many of new bloggers might be wondering how bounce rate is calculated and what does it exactly mean. The stickier your blog is, the lesser will be the bounce rate. This article lists out what is bounce rate, how bounce rate is calculated and what are tips to decrease it.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate tells what percentage of your visitors visit your blog but leave without going through your content or traversing other pages of your blog (i.e. they are just visiting landing page, and leave your site without opening the second page of your site)

There are many online tools available that show your site’s bounce rate such as Alexa.com, SimilarWeb, Google Analytics etc. This rate is shown as a percentage. For an instance, if your site has a bounce rate of 75%, it means that 75 out of every 100 visitors who clicked on to your link did not view the other pages of your blog rather simple left within seconds on visiting the first page of your blog. If visitors bounce, it suggests they didn’t find what they were looking for. If your site is experiencing a high bounce rate, you should take proper steps to find the root cause of high bounce rate. Then try to find a solution decrease high bounce rate.

Bounce Rate results by following actions as it causes visitors to leave your site:

The visitor closes your site tab
The visitor closes the browser.
The visitor clicks the “Back” button on his browser.
The visitor clicks on one of your ads (Sounds good J But it causes high bounce rate)
The visitor leaves your site by clicking on one of your external links.
The visitor types a new URL on his browser.

How Bounce Rate is calculated?

This is the first question comes in newbies when they hear about bounce rate – How bounce rate is calculated? In simple words, Bounce rate is calculated by an equation. Bounce rate formula is as follow:

Bounce rate = Total Number of Visits viewing one page only / Total number of visits

For example, if your site received 3, 00,000 visits in one month, out of which 1,50,000 bounced after visiting just one page, your bounce rate for that month would be 1,50,000 divided by 3,00,000, which equals to 0.50 (or 50%).

The lower the bounce rate on your blog, the better it is. It denotes that visitors are getting engaged by your content and design and that they are clicking to visit other pages on your site.

Tips to decrease Bounce Rate

I hope you are familiar with bounce rate meaning and how bounce rate is calculated. People ask me what is good bounce rate or average bounce rate, I think they might vary depending on many factors. If your site is experiencing high bounce rate, below are the tips for you on how to reduce bounce rate of your site –

Quality Content

Visitors come to your site to look for vital content. Your content should be up to the mark as per the Post Titles and keywords. Visitors are likely to leave the blog page if they do not find the information they are looking for as per to the keywords entered by them in the search engine.

Good Blog Design

Your blog should be designed in a decent way. Some professional sites use lots of animation, graphics that looks bad. The design of your site should be according to your niche. Bad design is often a common reason for visitors losing interest in the blog and thus leaving the site.

Ease of Use & Navigation:

Your blog should provide easy navigation to the users. Make use of bulleted lists, white space, good color contrast, and large headlines. Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers. Also provide relevant categories and other related articles to current articles to help the users to understand the concept in a better way. As users will visit more pages on your blog, it will decrease bounce rate.

Avoid using Pop-ups

Visitors often find pop-ups very annoying when they are bombarded with such as soon as they enter a blog page. You must let the visitor enjoy you blog first. You can show pop-ups after a certain period of time.

Slow loading speed

Users don’t like to wait, and we are becoming more and more accustomed to the fast load times, which means your blog will be left in the dust when a user must wait. There are plenty of other articles similar to yours. If your web page load time is high, users will close your web page and will try alternative pages available.

You can read this article Top 6 tips for decreasing web page load time to increase your website speed.

Unwanted Advertisements

Though showing advertisement is useful for bloggers to earn some money from the blog, but it should not frustrate the users. Users do not prefer to see the blog with lots of advertisement. Ensure that the ads you allow in your blog page are in some ay relevant to the content and should be shown in a decent manner in your blog. The advertisement should not keep popping up on your content.

Make Your Blog Mobile friendly

This is the mobile era and most people carry their mobiles and access internet through their mobiles itself. Blogs are effective as long as content can be accessed and used from a mobile device or tablet. Mobile usability does not necessarily mean from a design compatibility and accessibility standpoint, in many cases it means is the language on your site simple and clear enough that people on the go (on mobile devices) can still make sense of what they need to do to find information and at the very least contact you if necessary.

The article How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly In 5 Minutes might be helpful for you if your current site is not mobile friendly.

Provide Internal Search Functionality

Provide internal search functionality to your users. Web users have become so used to search that it is an easy behavioral pattern to accommodate and leverage for an improved experience.

Interlinking your posts

By interlinking your old posts at appropriate words, you will compel your readers to click on the link and navigate to the other post. If you interlink all the posts then the probability of your readers staying glued to your blog is for a long time and it decreases Bounce Rate.

Open External Links in New Windows

There comes a time when we refer external links to provide additional values to our users. Always open the external links in a new window instead of redirecting the user off your site.

You can do this by simply adding target=”_blank into <a> tag. So for example; <a href=”https://catchupdates.com” target=”_blank”>CatchUpdates.com</a>.

I hope now you are familiar with all aspects of Bounce Rate – What does that mean and how bounce rate is calculated and how can we decrease the bounce rate of our blog.

Do share your views and feedback and other tips you are using to decrease the bounce rate 🙂

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Mohit Arora

Founder at CatchUpdates

Hi, I am Mohit Arora, a passionate blogger and addicted reader. You can check my another blog TutorialsJar where I share programming tutorials.

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