All bloggers work hard to drive more traffic to their site and to get people to come back often. Realistically, driving traffic to your site isn’t that difficult – simply write some good quality posts and you’ll start to see traffic trickle to your site. But how do you turn that trickle into a flood and keep the volume of traffic growing?
With the advent of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, content has never been more important and you also need to consider your bounce rate – that is the percentage of users exiting your website without viewing other pages on the site.
Whether you have information to impart or a product to sell, the longer a user stays on your site, they more they will engage with you. This engagement may result in a purchase or it may result in a bookmarked page. Either way, improving your bounce rate is critical to your success.
Make It Relevant
Quality content is probably the most important consideration for any blog. Make content relevant to your audience and encourage people to want to read more. Use controversial or topical subjects. Use a new spin on the news articles that relate to your business or blog. Always aim to post the best blog posts you possibly can.
Also, make sure that you interlink posts to other relevant posts on your site so that users can click on these links to find more quality content. Interlinking blog posts can dramatically reduce bounce rate and increase the amount of pages your readers view.
Break It Down
Long posts are great, but you might want to consider breaking these longer posts up into multiple posts to provide more value. Many bloggers do this and then provide a link to the next part in the series. You could also use the ‘next page’ tag if you use WordPress to publish your blog. As a rule, any post that is over 400 words should probably be broken up into manageable chunks.
Also, tell your readers about other posts that relate to the post they just read. If they found that one interesting then perhaps they want some more. Many blog plugins allow you to tag ‘related posts’ and to show these in a prominent position on your page. Without this feature, users could simply flit off to another site and never come back.
Another reason why readers may leave your blog is page loading time. We live in a fast-paced world online and we don’t have time to wait for ads and images to load. Try to make your page as fast to load as possible. You’re a blog remember and apart from a small image for each post to make it interesting, you really don’t need to bother about anything else. Also, look at the number of plugins you have installed as these can often slow pages down.
Use Google Analytics or another web analytics service regularly to see how your bounce rate is doing. If you have any questions about using this service or any other aspect of web analysis we would be delighted to help you. Contact the Jungle team today.
