SEO
12 Reasons Your Website Can Have A High Bounce Rate
“Why do I have such a high bounce rate?”
It’s a question you’ll encounter on Twitter, Reddit, and your favorite digital marketing Facebook group.
It’s a question you may have even asked yourself. Heck, it could be the question that brought you to this article.
Whatever brought you here, rest assured: There is no “perfect” bounce rate.
But you don’t necessarily want one that’s too high.
Read on as we dig into what may be causing your high bounce rate and what you can do to fix it.
What Is A Bounce Rate?
As a refresher, Google refers to a “bounce” as “a single-page session on your site.”
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website (or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website) after viewing only one page on your site.
This can even happen when a user idles on a page for more than 30 minutes.
So, what is a high bounce rate, and why is it bad?
Well, “high bounce rate” is a relative term that depends on your company’s goals and what kind of site you have.
Low bounce rates can be a problem, too.
Data from Semrush suggests the average bounce rate ranges from 41% to 55%, with a range of 26% to 40% being optimal, and anything above 46% is considered “high.”
This aligns well with data from an earlier RocketFuel study, which found that most websites will see bounce rates between 26% to 70%:
Based on the data they gathered, RocketFuel provided a bounce rate grading system of sorts:
- 25% or lower: Something is probably broken.
- 26-40%: Excellent.
- 41-55%: Average.
- 56-70%: Higher than normal, but could make sense depending on the website.
- 70% or higher: Bad and/or something is probably broken.
How To Find Your Bounce Rate In Google Analytics
In Google Analytics 4, Google seems to have done away with bounce rate as we know it (more on this in a bit).
In Universal Analytics, you can find the overall bounce rate for your site in the Audience Overview tab.
You can find your bounce rate for individual channels and pages in the behavior column of most views in Google Analytics.
However, most organizations are currently transitioning to Google Analytics 4, affectionately known as GA4.
If your organization is in that boat, you may be wondering, “Where did the bounce rate go?”
Your eyes aren’t tricking you; Google indeed removed the bounce rate. Or, rather, they replaced it with a new and improved metric called “engagement rate.”
In GA4, you can find your site’s bounce rate engagement rate by navigating to Acquisition > User acquisition or Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
Engagement rate fixes some of the pitfalls that plagued bounce rate as a metric. For one, it includes sessions where a visitor converted or spent at least 10 seconds on the page, even if they did not visit any other pages – two types of sessions that were not factored in previously.
As a result, you should see your bounce rate lower in GA4. Once you do a little bit of math, that is.
To calculate your new bounce rate, you simply subtract your engagement rate from 100%.
While bounce rate is an important metric, I’m happy to see Google made this change.
Instead of focusing on the negative, it encourages us to focus on the positive: How many people are engaged with your site.
Plus, it’s a more accurate and relevant metric now.
In GA4, engagement rate counts a visitor as “engaged” if they visited 2+ pages, spent at least 10 seconds on your site or converted.
Now, let’s get back to what you came here for: Why your bounce rate is high and what you can do about it.
Possible Explanations For A High Bounce Rate
Below are 12 common causes of a high bounce rate, followed by five ways you can fix it.
1. Slow-To-Load Page
Google has a renewed focus on site speed, especially as a part of the Core Web Vitals initiative.
A slow-to-load page can be a huge problem for bounce rates.
Site speed is part of Google’s ranking algorithm. It always has been.
Google wants to promote content that provides a positive experience for users, and they recognize that a slow site can provide a poor experience.
Users want the facts fast – this is part of the reason Google has put so much work into featured snippets.
If your page takes longer than a few seconds to load, your visitors may get fed up and leave.
Fixing site speed is a lifelong journey for most SEO and marketing pros.
But the upside is that with each incremental fix, you should see an incremental boost in speed.
Review your page speed (overall and for individual pages) using tools like:
- Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Google Search Console PageSpeed reports.
- Lighthouse reports.
- Pingdom.
- GTmetrix.
They’ll offer you recommendations specific to your site, such as compressing your images, reducing third-party scripts, and leveraging browser caching.
2. Self-Sufficient Content*
Sometimes your content is efficient enough that people can quickly get what they need and bounce!
This can be a wonderful thing.
Perhaps you’ve achieved the content marketer’s dream and created awesome content that wholly consumed them for a handful of minutes in their lives.
Or perhaps you have a landing page that only requires the user to complete a short lead form.
To determine whether bounce rate is nothing to worry about, you’ll want to look at the Time Spent on Page and Average Session Duration metrics in Google Analytics.
You can also conduct user experience testing and A/B testing to see if the high bounce rate is a problem.
If the user is spending a couple of minutes or more on the page, that sends a positive signal to Google that they found your page highly relevant to their search query.
If you want to rank for that particular search query, that kind of user intent is gold.
If the user is spending less than a minute on the page (which may be the case of a properly optimized landing page with a quick-hit CTA form), consider enticing the reader to read some of your related blog posts after filling out the form.
*This is an example where GA4’s engagement rate may be a superior metric to UA’s bounce rate. In GA4, this type of session would not count as a bounce and would instead count as “engaged.”
3. Disproportional Contribution By A Few Pages
If we expand on the example from the previous section, you may have a few pages on your site that are contributing disproportionally to the overall bounce rate for your site.
Google is savvy at recognizing the difference between these.
If your single CTA landing pages reasonably satisfy user intent and cause them to bounce quickly after taking an action, but your longer-form content pages have a lower bounce rate, you’re probably good to go.
However, you will want to dig in and confirm that this is the case or discover if some of these pages with a higher bounce rate shouldn’t be causing users to leave en masse.
Open up Google Analytics. Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages, and sort by Bounce Rate.
Consider adding an advanced filter to remove pages that might skew the results.
For example, it’s not necessarily helpful to agonize over the one Twitter share with five visits that have all your social UTM parameters tacked onto the end of the URL.
My rule of thumb is to determine a minimum threshold of volume that is significant for the page.
Choose what makes sense for your site, whether it’s 100 visits or 1,000 visits, and then click on Advanced and filter for Sessions greater than that.
In GA4, navigate to Acquisition > User acquisition or Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. From there, click on “Add filter +” underneath the report title.
Create a filter by selecting “Session default channel grouping” (or “Session medium” or “Session source / medium” etc.). Then check the box for “Organic Search” in the Dimension values menu.
Click the blue Apply button. Once you’re back in the report, click on the blue plus sign to open up a new menu.
Navigate to Page/screen and select Landing page.
4. Misleading Title Tag And/Or Meta Description
Ask yourself: Is the content of your page accurately summarized by your title tag and meta description?
If not, visitors may enter your site thinking your content is about one thing, only to find that it isn’t, and then bounce back to whence they came.
Whether it was an innocent mistake or you were trying to game the system by optimizing for keyword clickbait (shame on you!), this is, fortunately, simple enough to fix.
Either review the content of your page and adjust the title tag and meta description accordingly. Or, rewrite the content to address the search queries you want to attract visitors for.
You can also check what kind of meta description Google has auto-generated for your page for common searches – Google can change your meta description, and if they make it worse, you can take steps to remedy that.
5. Blank Page Or Technical Error
If your bounce rate is exceptionally high and you see that people are spending less than a few seconds on the page, it’s likely your page is blank, returning a 404, or otherwise not loading properly.
Take a look at the page from your audience’s most popular browser and device configurations (e.g., Safari on desktop and mobile, Chrome on mobile, etc.) to replicate their experience.
You can also check in Search Console under Coverage to discover the issue from Google’s perspective.
Correct the issue yourself or talk to someone who can – an issue like this can cause Google to drop your page from the search results in a hurry.
6. Bad Link From Another Website
You could be doing everything perfectly on your end to achieve a normal or low bounce rate from organic search results and still have a high bounce rate from your referral traffic.
The referring site could be sending you unqualified visitors, or the anchor text and context for the link could be misleading.
Sometimes this is a result of sloppy copywriting.
The writer or publisher linked to your site in the wrong part of the copy or didn’t mean to link to your site at all.
Reach out to the author of the article first. If they don’t respond or they can’t update the article after publishing, then you can escalate the issue to the site’s editor or webmaster.
Politely ask them to remove the link to your site – or update the context, whichever makes sense.
(Tip: You can easily find their contact information with this guide.)
Unfortunately, the referring website may be trying to sabotage you with some negative SEO tactics out of spite or just for fun.
For example, they may have linked to your “Guide To Adopting A Puppy” with the anchor text of FREE GET RICH QUICK SCHEME.
You should still reach out and politely ask them to remove the link, but if needed, you’ll want to update your disavow file in Search Console.
Disavowing the link won’t reduce your bounce rate, but it will tell Google not to take that site’s link into account when it comes to determining the quality and relevance of your site.
7. Affiliate Landing Page Or Single-Page Site*
If you’re an affiliate, the whole point of your page may be to deliberately send people away from your website to the merchant’s site.
In these instances, you’re doing the job right if the page has a higher bounce rate.
A similar scenario would be if you have a single-page website, such as a landing page for your ebook or a simple portfolio site.
It’s common for sites like these to have a very high bounce rate since there’s nowhere else to go.
Remember that Google can usually tell when a website is doing a good job satisfying user intent even if the user’s query is answered super quickly (sites like WhatIsMyScreenResolution.com come to mind).
If you’re interested, you can adjust your bounce rate so it makes more sense for the goals of your website.
For Single Page Apps (or SPAs), you can adjust your analytics settings to see different parts of a page as a different page, adjusting the bounce rate to better reflect the user experience.
*This is another example where GA4’s engagement rate may be a superior metric to UA’s bounce rate. If you’ve set it up so that a click on your affiliate link is considered a conversion event, this type of session would not count as a bounce and would instead count as “engaged.”
8. Low-Quality Or Underoptimized Content
Visitors may be bouncing from your website because your content is just plain bad.
Take a long, hard look at your page and have your most judgmental and honest colleague or friend review it.
(Ideally, this person either has a background in content marketing or copywriting, or they fall into your target audience).
One possibility is that your content is great, but you just haven’t optimized it for online reading – or for the audience that you’re targeting.
- Are you writing in simple sentences (think high school students versus PhDs)?
- Is it easily scannable with lots of header tags?
- Does it cleanly answer questions?
- Have you included images to break up the copy and make it easy on the eyes?
Writing for the web is different than writing for offline publications.
Brush up your online copywriting skills to increase the time people spend reading your content.
The other possibility is that your content is poorly written overall or simply isn’t something your audience cares about.
Consider hiring a freelance copywriter (like me!) or content strategist who can help you transform your ideas into powerful content that converts.
9. Bad Or Obnoxious UX
Are you bombarding people with ads, pop-up surveys, and email subscribe buttons?
CTA-heavy features like these may be irresistible to the marketing and sales team, but using too many of them can make a visitor run for the hills.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are all about user experience – not only are they ranking factors, but they impact your site visitors’ happiness, too.
Is your site confusing to navigate?
Perhaps your visitors are looking to explore more, but your blog is missing a search box, or the menu items are difficult to click on a smartphone.
As online marketers, we know our websites in and out.
It’s easy to forget that what seems intuitive to us is anything but to our audience.
Make sure you’re avoiding these common design mistakes, and have a web or UX designer review the site and let you know if anything pops out to them as problematic.
10. The Page Isn’t Mobile-Friendly
While SEOs know it’s important to have a mobile-friendly website, the practice isn’t always followed in the real world.
Google announced its switch to mobile-first indexing way back in 2017, but many websites today still wouldn’t be considered mobile-friendly.
Websites that haven’t been optimized for mobile don’t look good on mobile devices – and they don’t load too fast, either.
That’s a recipe for a high bounce rate.
Even if your website was implemented using responsive design principles, it’s still possible that the live page doesn’t read as mobile-friendly to the user.
Sometimes, when a page gets squeezed into a mobile format, it causes some of the key information to move below the fold.
Now, instead of seeing a headline that matches what they saw in search, mobile users only see your site’s navigation menu.
Assuming the page doesn’t offer what they need, they bounce back to Google.
If you see a page with a high bounce rate and no glaring issues immediately jump out to you, test it on your mobile phone.
You can also check for mobile issues in Google Search Console and Lighthouse.
11. Content Depth*
Google can give people quick answers through featured snippets and knowledge panels; you can give people deep, interesting, interconnected content that’s a step beyond that.
Make sure your content compels people to click to explore other pages on your site if it makes sense.
Provide interesting, relevant internal links, and give them a reason to stay.
And for the crowd that wants the quick answer, give them a TL;DR summary at the top.
*This is another example where GA4’s engagement rate may be a superior metric to UA’s bounce rate. If your content is deeply engrossing, people will keep reading after the 10-second mark, leading GA4 to count their session as “engaged” instead of a bounce.
12. Asking For Too Much
Don’t ask someone for their credit card number, social security, grandmother’s pension, and children’s names right off the bat (or ever, in some of those examples) – your user doesn’t trust you yet.
People are ready to be suspicious, considering how many scam websites are out there.
Being presented with a big pop-up asking for info will cause a lot of people to bounce immediately.
Your job is to build trust with your visitors.
Do so, and you’ll both be happier. Your visitor will feel like they can trust you, and you’ll have a lower bounce rate.
Either way, if it makes users happy, Google likes it.
Pro Tips For Reducing Your Bounce Rate
Regardless of the reason behind your high bounce rate, here’s a summary of best practices you can implement to bring it down.
Make Sure Your Content Lives Up To The Hype
Together, you can think of your title tag and meta description as your website’s virtual billboard on Google.
Whatever you’re advertising in the SERPs, your content needs to match.
Don’t call your page an “ultimate guide” if it’s a short post with three tips.
Don’t claim to be the “best” vacuum if your user reviews show a three-star rating.
You get the idea.
Also, make your content readable:
- Break up your text with lots of white space.
- Add supporting images.
- Use short sentences.
- Spellcheck is your friend.
- Use a good, clean design.
- Don’t bombard visitors with too many ads.
Keep Critical Elements Above The Fold
Sometimes, your content matches what you advertise in your title tag and meta description. It’s just that your visitors can’t tell at first glance.
When people arrive on a website, they make an immediate first impression.
You want that first impression to validate whatever they thought they were going to see when they arrived.
A prominent H1 should match the title they read on Google.
If it’s an ecommerce site, a photo should match the product description they saw on Google.
Also, make sure these elements aren’t obscured by pop-ups or advertisements.
Speed Up Your Site
When it comes to SEO, faster is always better.
Keeping up with site speed is a task that should remain firmly stuck at the top of your SEO to-do list.
There will always be new ways to compress, optimize, and otherwise accelerate load time. For now, make sure to:
- Compress all images before loading them to your site, and only use the maximum display size necessary.
- Review and remove any external or load-heavy scripts, stylesheets, and plugins. If there are any you don’t need, remove them. For the ones you do need, see if there’s a faster option.
- Tackle the basics: Use a CDN, minify JavaScript and CSS, and set up browser caching.
- Check Lighthouse for more suggestions.
Minimize Non-Essential Elements
Don’t bombard your visitors with pop-up ads, in-line promotions, and other content they don’t care about.
Visual overwhelm can cause visitors to bounce.
What CTA is the most important for the page?
Compellingly highlight that.
For everything else, delegate it to your sidebar or footer.
Edit, edit, edit!
Help People Get Where They Want To Be Faster
Want to encourage people to browse more of your site?
Make it easy for them.
- Leverage on-site search with predictive search, helpful filters, and an optimized “no results found” page.
- Rework your navigation menu and A/B test how complex vs. simple drop-down menus affect your bounce rate.
- Include a Table of Contents in your long-form articles with anchor links taking people straight to the section they want to read.
Conclusion
Remember: Bounce rates are just one metric.
A high bounce rate doesn’t mean the end of the world.
Some well-designed, effective webpages have high bounce rates – and that’s okay.
Bounce rates can be a measure of how well your site is performing, but it’s good to keep them in context.
Hopefully, this article helped you diagnose what’s causing your high bounce rate, and you have a good idea of how to fix it.
Not sure where to start?
Make your site useful, user-focused, and fast – good sites attract good users.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Cagkan Sayin/Shutterstock
SEO
Google On Spammy Backlinks & Negative Impact On Rankings
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about what to do about an increase in spammy backlinks that are perceived as having a negative impact on rankings. Mueller’s answer showed what publishers should focus on.
Noticing Spammy Backlinks
The person asking the question said that they had noticed an increase in spammy backlinks and that they associated it with a negative impact on their rankings. They also said that it was affecting their “overall credibility.”
They didn’t elaborate what they meant by “overall credibility” but perhaps they were talking about a third party site metric like Domain Authority.
This is what the person asked:
“I’ve noticed a significant increase in spammy backlinks pointing to my website, and it’s negatively impacting my site’s search engine rankings and overall credibility. Despite my efforts, I’m struggling to effectively remove these spammy backlinks.
Can anyone provide guidance or suggestions on the best practices and tools for removing spammy backlinks and restoring the integrity of my website’s link profile? Any tips or suggestions will be helpful.”
John Mueller Answers Question About Spammy Backlinks
Mueller answered that it’s not necessary to do anything about “spammy backlinks” because Google ignores them. He didn’t even suggest using the Disavow Tool, a tool that tells Google to ignore specific links that a publisher is responsible for.
Mueller responded:
“I’d strongly recommend focusing on other things – Google’s systems are really good at dealing with random spammy links, but – like users – they do get hung up on websites that aren’t awesome. Make your site awesome instead of chasing those links.”
About “Overall Credibility”
Third party metrics don’t offer insights into how Google sees a website. They’re just the opinion of a third party that can be used to measure one site against another.
My background in SEO goes back 25 years to a time when Google used to show a representation of PageRank on Google’s toolbar. I was an authoritative source of information that related data about the quantity of links and whether or not a site was indexed or not indexed. Yet even Google’s own PageRank tool didn’t accurately reflect the ability of a site to rank well.
Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow scores are useful because they communicate the kinds of links flowing to a website and gives an idea of what the backlinks say about a site.
But other than that, a third party “authority” metric is not anything I have ever used and will never use. Many SEOs with longtime experience don’t use those metrics.
Read the Reddit discussion:
Can anyone help me on how to remove spammy backlinks?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)
You won’t read anything good about the content marketing funnel in this article. Only bad things. Like, it’s too linear and simplistic to address the complexities of customer journeys.
If you need a framework to build your content strategy on, it should probably be a no-funnel framework instead. And there are very good reasons for it.
A funnel in marketing is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.
Depending on the version, it has 3 – 6 stages, and it looks something like this:
Traditionally, all content types have their designated place in each stage:
- Top: product landing pages, ebooks, guides, most social media posts, etc.
- Middle: webinars, case studies, lead nurturing programs, etc.
- Bottom: success stories, white papers, sales enablement materials, etc.
Makes sense, right? Not entirely.
It oversimplifies literally everything important for a content marketer. And because of that, the model gets some things completely wrong and ignores others.
This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve applied the funnel approach at various companies. Initially, it was reassuring, providing a sense of structure and control. However, the deeper I got, the more confusing it became. It started to seem like the sense of order was purely imaginary, as there was no reliable method to verify if people were truly following the funnel.
1. Misunderstands consumer behavior
The funnel model assumes a perfectly linear path from awareness to purchase and tries to rush people through it. Or, actually, it makes you think you should rush people through it with your content.
However, consumer behavior is more complex and non-linear. People often jump between stages, revisit them, or take unique paths to purchase.
So, the journey is not a funnel; it’s more like a maze.
B2C customer journeys are even more peculiar. Remember that time when you saw an ad and bought that product immediately? Or conversely, how the journey from see to buy lasted for years. I know I can:
But content marketers shouldn’t try to solve that maze, or cut a straight line through it just for their convenience. They should rather adapt to it.
2. Tries to fit round pegs in square holes
Not all content types can be, nor should be, fit into rigid stages of the funnel, as the model wants it.
Here’s an example based on one of our articles. Which stage(s) of the marketing funnel does our blog post about “How to find low competition keywords” serve?
As you can see, the model can’t handle one of the basic forms of content marketing – a blog post. But take any type of educational content, and you’ll find the same problem. Many content types can serve multiple stages of the funnel or work across them. They can both attract and reengage a visitor or even bring them all the way from discovery to purchase.
Because of that, the content marketing funnel simply isn’t helpful for creating content that’s enjoyable for the user and effective for the business.
3. Neglects customer retention
Customer retention is how good you are at keeping your customers. It’s important because you don’t want customers to buy just once from you; you want to keep coming back so that you don’t need to attract a total stranger each time to make a sale — that’s both hard and expensive.
Here’s another way to look at it. According to the study by Bain and Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. And it makes total sense if you think about it — if someone asked you to generate an extra $1000 in sales in 24 hours, would you go to existing customers or try to find new ones?
But if you’re practicing the old ways of the funnel, catering to your existing customers is very limited because the funnel ends at the purchase stage. There’s nothing a content marketer can do nor should do after a prospect becomes a customer.
It’s having a party where you’re so focused on inviting new guests that you forget to entertain the ones already inside.
4. Ignores customer expansion
If you only chase new customers and forget about the ones you already have, you miss the chance to make more sales to them or get them to recommend your business to others. Happy customers can really boost your business by buying more and telling their friends about you.
How can content help with that? One good way is to create product-led content. This type of content is designed to show how your product can solve the customer’s problem.
The mechanism is simple: showing product features in action turns a regular user into a power user. They start to use more features and get better value from them, which builds loyalty and gives you a good ground for upselling.
And if that content is really good, people will share it with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.
The best thing: good content will be recommended not only by your customers. People don’t really need to be your customers or know a lot about your brand to give your content a shout-out on social media.
The best solution to the shortcomings of the funnel is to have no funnel at all. Here’s why:
- Adapting to consumer behavior, not forcing it. Focus on how consumers naturally interact with content rather than trying to dictate their journey. Make your content easily accessible without imposing how it should be consumed.
- A more efficient use of content marketing. Content can work both pre-sales and post-sales. It doesn’t have to be useful in one moment in time. It can be designed to stay useful and relevant over time.
- A more helpful way to create content. No time wasted on deciding whether that guide you’re about to write belongs to the top or middle of the funnel. You can simply focus on delivering value and delighting your audience.
Here are three different no-funnel models that share those advantages.
This approach is about using your content to directly boost demand for your product, whether before or after a sale.
Instead of sorting content by stages of a sales funnel, you rate it based on how closely it relates to your product.
So for example, for a content marketing tool, topics with high business potential would include content marketing metrics, “B2B content marketing”, “content ideation”, “content optimization”, and “content distribution” (and not an interview with content marketers or “history of content marketing”, etc.).
This scoring system makes planning your content strategy really easy. You can quickly decide how much of each type of content to make. Also, you can use it with other important metrics (we use it with organic traffic potential) to further prioritize content.
Ahrefs has been using this model for years, especially for SEO content, which is most of what we publish. It’s great for understanding which search terms are most valuable.
Take these two keywords below as an example. The first one has a lot more traffic potential but is too broad to easily include our product — it would get a “1.” Conversely, the keyword with less traffic but more focused on SEO would get a “3” because it’s more relevant to our customers and our product.
The Business Potential Framework might be a good fit for you if you’re working in an established industry, where there’s already considerable demand for content directly linked to products like yours. This will make it easier to find topics with a score of 2 and 3. You can gauge that demand by looking at search volume in our free keywords generator.
The Content Playground, devised by Ashley Faus, reimagines the buyer’s journey as an open, interactive space, akin to a playground, moving away from the traditional funnel’s linear path.
It aims to cater to varied audience interests and learning styles by offering a mix of deep dives, strategic frameworks, and practical tips. To achieve this, it covers topics in three levels:
- Conceptual: covering big ideas and their significance.
- Strategic: outlining frameworks and processes.
- Tactical: providing specific, actionable steps.
Staying with the content marketing tool example, topics you would create content about could look like this: “what is content marketing” (conceptual), “developing a content marketing strategy” (strategic), “how to promote content” (tactical).
To illustrate, this content hub on Agile from Atlassian is designed to be a content playground. There is a mix of all three types of content, and the user can start at any point, go as deep as they like, and jump to another topic at any time.
Naturally, the content needs to be interlinked and ungated so consumers may access it however they want and navigate through it freely. The bonus of that is getting organic traffic from related keywords. According to Ahrefs, this one hub attracts over 591k organic visits every month, and it looks like it’s about to get more.
But a playground doesn’t need to be confined to one site. As long as you tackle a topic with these three types and allow people to access them freely, you can have it scattered across a limitless number of sites and platforms: microsites, blog posts, social media, email, ebooks, etc.
I had a brief chat with Ashley, the mind behind this framework, to understand where this framework fits best. I learned that the framework was developed and tested with B2B marketers in mind, and that’s where it’s most relevant. B2C marketers simply don’t have as big of a problem with customers “coming and going” and re-engaging them on different channels.
There is a way to cover all customer intents, topics, journey stages, and key marketing channels naturally by simply focusing on what matters to your audience and where they are willing to consume content. I call it the Cluster-Channel Network (CCN).
Two core elements of the framework are:
- Clusters: thematic groupings of content around a central topic, supported by a network of related subtopics. They represent things people care about.
- Channels: platforms and mediums through which your message reaches your audience. They represent meeting places that bring you and your audience together to talk about things they care about. Think advertising, email, social media, Google, etc.
CCN ensures a multi-channel presence with content that both attracts your audience and makes your brand an authority in a carefully picked selection of topics.
What’s more, this is an efficient framework because it allows you to “squeeze out” the most of any topic. That’s an important benefit because there are only so many topics a brand can comfortably cover, without creating turning into a content farm spinning irrelevant content just for the sake of traffic.
The framework consists of five steps.
- Identify relevant clusters: choose clusters aligned with your brand’s expertise and audience interests.
- Define subtopics: within each cluster, pinpoint subtopics for comprehensive coverage.
- Produce core content: select a primary channel and format for in-depth content, making this your centerpiece to attract traffic from other platforms.
- Distribute across channels: repurpose the core content into smaller, channel-specific formats.
- Interlink clusters and subtopics: connect related clusters and subtopics. Chances are, people interested in more than one cluster (e.g. SEO and content marketing).
If we were to visualize this framework consisting of four clusters, it would look something like this:
So if we used content marketing as a cluster, one of the subtopics could be AI content. For that subtopic, you could create a blog post about ethics in content marketing in the AI era and distribute it as a thread on X, offer that topic to podcast hosts, etc.
This framework will work best if you have the resources to be present on multiple channels and you’re committed to long-term goals (building trust and authority takes time).
Tip
You can find clusters and subtopics very fast using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just plug a broad term related to your product (your cluster), and let AI do the brainstorming.
From a bit over 10 keywords the AI found for me for the word “SEO”, Keywords Explorer found over 32k keywords which then organized into 3466 ready-to-target topics in a matter of seconds. All with traffic potential and keyword difficulty metrics to help with prioritization.
Final thoughts
On a final note, the topics you choose to cover are as important as these frameworks. Check out our guide to content ideation to never run out of ideas.
SEO
How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign
It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:
- Loss of rankings and traffic.
- Loses of link equity.
- Broken pages.
- Sluggish page loading.
- Bad mobile experience.
- Broken internal links.
- Duplicate content.
For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.
Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.
Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.
Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.
It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.
Testing your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness before it goes live is the best way to ensure that your new site will comply with Google’s page experience guidelines.
The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.
Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.
An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:
- Unwanted noindex pages.
- Sites accessible both as http and https.
- Broken pages.
So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.
Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .
You might want to give some issues higher priority than others. See our take on the most impactful technical SEO issues.
Tip
You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.
By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:
- ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
- ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
- ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
- ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool
Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:
- Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
- Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
- Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
- Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.
Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.
Tip
Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.
Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.
Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.
To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.
Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.
The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).
You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.
Recommendation
If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.
This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.
Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:
- Keywords in text, title and H1s: changing keywords can alter the page’s relevance for corresponding queries. For instance, if a product page ranks for “kick scooter for kids”, you might lose that if you start scratching the phrase out from the crucial parts of the content.
- Depth of content: expanding or reducing content should be done with the intent to serve user needs better, provide more value, or clarify existing information (i.e., search intent). Keep in mind that Google rewards helpful, people-first content, and not necessarily creative, persuasive copywriting.
- Internal links: changing/cutting a few internal links shouldn’t do any harm, but you need to be tactical about it – ask yourself if any particular change could hurt the ranking. Keep in mind that internal links aid the flow of link equity and help Google understand the context of pages.
- Distance of that page from the homepage: keep high-value pages close to the homepage to signal their importance to search engines.
- Schema markup: any changes should aim to accurately describe the content and take advantage of eligible schema properties.
- Page speed: don’t overuse heavy graphics, animations, and video. Again, make sure to pre-test the staging site for CWV and run a site audit right after the launch.
Final thoughts
While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.
Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.
Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.
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