Getting blog traffic is something we all work at as bloggers and once people are here you want to go some way towards ensuring they stick around for a while. Below are seven ways to keep traffic on your blog and reduce your bounce rate so people stay around for longer – giving them more of an opportunity to get to know you!
What is bounce rate?
When you write a blog post you attract attention from people searching for information who will find what you have written. If someone arrives at your blog and then instantly leaves that is known as your “bounce rate” and Google uses your bounce rate (as well as other things) as a way to decide how great your blog is – after all if it is good people stick around and if it isn’t they “bounce”!
As a blogger you really need to be aware of your bounce rate and keep it below 75% if you can. The best way to find out is to install Google Analytics on your blog to keep an eye on it. There is a great plugin you can use with your WordPress blog called Google Analytics for WordPress
If you find your bounce rate is high here are seven things you can do to help you move towards reducing it:
1. Use keywords on your blog posts
You can ensure people don’t come in and bounce right out again by making sure you use keyword relevant to the content you are writing. It will also help you find relevant readers – people sometimes leave because they found your post but it is not relevant to them. Using keywords on your blog posts can help you avoid that.
2. Write engaging content
Keep people reading by writing great content that they want to read and hopefully want to share. Your content will be the reason they clicked on the link to your blog post in the first place so make sure it is relevant to what they were looking for – there is nothing worse than searching for something and finding unrelated content!
3. Avoid adding loads of advertising
There is nothing worse than arriving at a blog post that you think is going to help only to see a bunch of Google Adsense adverts to the left of it, at the beginning of it before I even get to reading anything! Cut down on the advertising and give people a chance to read the content you have written. That way you will keep them around for longer.
4. Keep your blog theme easy to navigate
I know news templates are quite popular where you can present a lot of information on your homepage but sometimes it also confuses too because there is so much choice it is difficult to know where to go first. Keep your structure as simple as you can and go for basic themes to ensure people find the information you want them to on your blog.
5. Use a related post plugin
Related post plugins can keep people on your site because the post they are reading will link to other blog posts you have written that are related to the same topic. It will encourage people to stay around and find out more.
6. Use internal linking
You can keep traffic on your blog and reduce your bounce rate by using internal linking and linking from one blog post to another one that you believe is relevant to what you have just been writing about. That way people will move from one blog post to another. Once a person has read an interesting blog post it can be difficult for them to know what to do next so help them out by linking to something else they might want to read – or use a plugin as suggested above which will do it for you.
7. Improve your blog loading time
Have a great WordPress theme, don’t over load your blog with too many plugins and be careful with all those images – they all contribute towards slowing down how quickly your blog shows up when someone clicks. I know myself if I have to wait too long I usually click away before the blog post even appears!
Install the Google analytics plugin first and give yourself at least one month of regular blogging to get an accurate idea of how your blog is performing – after three months you should get a very clear idea. Set about making any changes you think you might need immediately if you are showing a blog with a high bounce rate because it really won’t help your standing with the searching engines if you want to improve your ranking.
Here is a helpful video on bounce rate
Traffic generation using blog commenting
I mentioned my blog stats to Jack Humphrey from Blog Success and the fact that I woke up one morning and found that Mindset Of A Blogger had become a PR 4 blog. I wanted to investigate the main reason for it and turns out I get a lot of traffic generation using blog commenting and of course links back to my blog.
There are some great free tools that you can use to look at different aspects of your blog and as a professional blogger learning how to blog you really should be using them to take a look “under the hood” – because this is as important as writing content and getting comments.
Google webmaster have a number of free tools that will let you check your stats and SEOMoz.org is another great place for free tools.
They have a linkback tool called linkscape that will show you where your links are coming from and a large proportion of mine were from blogs that I had made comments on including DoshDosh, Matt Cutts and others.
Blog commenting links
It also lets you know the number of overall links you have and the authority of your domain which predicts a domains ranking potential and is a nice metric to use to improve on the performance of your blog.