Why Blog Articles Often Have High Bounce Rates (And What To Do About It)

Producing regular articles for the blog on your website is a way of significantly growing your website traffic, building an audience, establishing your knowledge/expertise and raising awareness of your business. With our marketing clients, we’ll write and publish their blog articles for them which leads to some fantastic results, and part of our programme is to review the progress each month using website analytics.

It’s exciting to see increases in website visitors, but when drilling down into the analytics for individual pages, we often see that blog articles, while driving traffic, have higher bunce rates than the rest of the website. So, is this something to be concerned about?

What Is Bounce Rate?

Let’s be clear what bounce rate means. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that only visit one page of a website. It doesn’t mean they leave immediately, so someone could read a blog post for 10 minutes and then leave without visiting any other pages – and they would still count as a ‘bounce’. This is normal browsing behaviour and it’s common for blog articles to get steep bounce rates, even if they have a high overall number of visits.

Why Is This?

1) Each blog post constitutes an individual page of your website, so most people find articles through social media, organic search results on Google (which is why keywords are so important when choosing article titles) or email. People are attracted to the article title/headline, they click to read the article and that’s often all they want for now. They may not be aware of your company at all at this stage, but if they’re impressed by the article they might subscribe to the blog, or come back at a later date.

2) In general, blog readers are people doing research or ‘window shopping’, rather than being actively in the market and out to spend money imminently. They are still prospects – which is why it is useful to have a clear call to action and enquiry form on each blog page – but are at an earlier stage in the buyer journey than people who purposefully visit your website to look through your products.

3) A high proportion of blog readers access articles through mobile phones, so are less likely to go on to browse the website. (You can encourage this by ensuring your website is fully optimised for mobile devices.)

How To Improve Bounce Rate On Your Blog

Here are strategies you can use which will reduce the bounce rate:

• Ensure every article has a call to action on it. These calls to action should be tested to see which combination of images, text and colours get the most clicks.
• Add a ‘related articles’ feature – showing other articles similar to the one your reader is looking at can encourage them to keep reading.
• Include relevant links to further resources within the body of your articles.
• Ensure your website and/or blog loads quickly, especially on mobile phones – poor load speed is one of the biggest contributors to a high bounce rate.
• Check your blog looks good on mobile phones.
• Make it easy for readers to browse other articles by categorising them by topic.

Blogs, Brand & Leads

Blog articles and news stories are always likely to have a higher bounce rate than pages of your website, so is nothing to be alarmed about – although you still want to try and improve it. Some businesses separate the bounce rate on their main website from their blog in Analytics so they can see if the overall bounce rate for the website remains unchanged.

Blogs play an important role in bringing visitors to your site, building your brand and driving strong SEO signals. Popular blog articles can rank highly with Google for important keywords and will drive more organic traffic to your site over time. Blog articles also strengthen your market position by underlining your authority and building trust among your customers – and don’t forget that some visitors will respond to your calls to action and become leads.

To find out more about the role of blog articles in a marketing campaign, please call 01332 343 281 today.

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