SEO
20 Proven Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Properly diagnosing high bounce rates to identify areas of improvement is a useful way to increase user engagement, improve site rankings, and put more money in your pocket.
There are many misconceptions about bounce rates, so let’s define what it is and explore why it’s sometimes a good thing but other times needs improvement.
Google defines bounce rate as:
“…is a single-page session on your site.
In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”
Essentially, this means that when a visitor “bounces” from a webpage, they have left not just that webpage; they’ve also exited the entire website after only viewing one page.
While this definition is clear and easy to understand, the underlying cause of a bounce is generally more complex.
What Causes A High Bounce Rate?
Sometimes a high bounce rate can be an indication of a poor user experience.
A site visitor hit the page and either the page didn’t deliver the content they were expecting or they were underwhelmed by something else, like a non-responsive webpage.
On the other hand, a high bounce rate can also be the result of a positive user experience.
For example, let’s imagine a user is searching for a recipe’s ingredient measurements.
They click through the search result and land on a site where they immediately see the ingredients list need. They get it and leave the site.
That high bounce rate is an example of a great user experience. The visitor instantly found the information that they were looking for, then left.
Ideally, some of those high bounce rate site visitors will bookmark the page for future reference, and some other visitors may remember the site another day and return to it, seeking it out by name on Google.
When Google Causes A High Bounce Rate
Google’s algorithm exceeds at identifying what a page of content is about and what a search query is about.
However, there may be some rare edge cases where Google may show a website that does not have the correct answer.
This can happen when a searcher uses a poor choice of keywords (like vague words) or the search phrase is rare.
In that situation, Google sent the visitor to the incorrect webpage.
The visitor did not find the content they needed.
The high bounce rate in that situation is not a poor reflection on the website itself, as there’s nothing wrong with the content.
The source of the problem could be with Google’s algorithm or, more likely, with the search phrase a user typed in.
A high bounce rate is not always a sign of problems with the webpage itself.
Nevertheless, it’s still important to keep an eye on bounce rates to make sure there is not something there that might be driving website visitors away.
Here are 20 proven ways to reduce your bounce rate when needed.
1. Pay Attention To Page Load Time
When a user has to wait an excessive amount of time (and by excessive I mean more than three seconds) for a page load, it creates an incredibly poor user experience.
The content on the page does not matter if a visitor cannot even see it immediately.
Page load time is even more crucial on mobile devices because users are more likely to become frustrated with slow load times and bounce.
2. Make Site Search Easy
Some websites neglect adding a site search functionality or make it difficult to see.
If a user is searching for something specific that they do not instantly see on a page, this is an extremely useful tool that they can use to search with instead of possibly leaving the page or site entirely.
3. Provide Easy Navigation
Navigation should be easy and effortless for visitors.
When a user gets to a site, they need a clear direction of where the content that they are looking for lives.
If this is not simplistic and clearly laid out in an intuitive navigation, they will most likely bounce from the site.
4. Focus On A Great Design
Good website design is intuitive and builds trust with a user. A good website design is also a signal of quality.
Visitors will not spend a large amount of time a site that is unpleasant, unattractive, or have difficulty trusting.
Provide an appealing user experience by starting with a great design is not just about aesthetics. It’s about creating a functional, intuitive, and pleasant overall website experience.
5. Keep Mobile Top-Of-Mind
Mobile users have even less patience than desktop users.
A website should have a responsive design in order to provide users on mobile devices with a solid user experience.
6. Make Webpages Easy To Read
Content on a webpage should be clearly and effectively formatted.
This is crucial from a user experience standpoint, as no visitor to a website wants to see large chunks of disorganized text.
When this happens, users will usually skip over crucial content.
However, if that content was formatted into smaller blocks, including bullet points or also image or video content, a user will have a much easier time understanding the content and sharing it with others.
7. Write Shorter Paragraphs
One of the primary things that help with the overall readability of a site is the length of the content.
Create content within short paragraphs so that your visitors can quickly read the content on the small mobile devices most people use these days when consuming content.
8. Use Various Types Of Content
Another focus area when it comes to website readability is to use multiple forms of content in order to engage site visitors more effectively.
Video content can communicate certain kinds of information (like how-to instructions) more efficiently than text.
High-quality images can also help to break up the text, improve communication of big ideas, and help to reduce bounce rates.
9. Use Relevant Keywords
Use relevant keywords that are appropriate for the content topic.
The accurate use of words, sentences, paragraphs, and headings will help to communicate to Google what the page is about.
Stay on topic, do not stray.
The closer on topic the webpage is, the more likely the visitors Google sends will also be on-topic with what they expect to find on the page, thereby reducing the bounce rate.
10. Target Relevant Audience
Similar to relevant keywords, relevant content, on the whole, should be used across the site, and the right users should be targeted.
Identify the core target audience of the site and create niche content around that audience.
Targeting should not be too broad, as there is a greater chance of getting users who are not looking for what your site features.
Honing in and focusing on a specific group of users helps to ensure that you are finding people who want to find what your site offers.
These users will be more engaged and apt to spend a great amount of time exploring your site.
11. Stay Away From Popups
Users generally do not enjoy intrusive interstitials that prevent them from getting to the content.
There are better ways to show interstitials that will not impact users or your webpage rankings.
The rule of thumb is to not get in the way of a site visitor and the content they expect to see.
Allowing them to scroll and enjoy the content first is a better user experience.
If you can avoid using interstitial popups then give it a try.
12. Limit Distracting Ads
Similar to avoiding interstitials and popups, distracting ads should be avoided as well.
A horizontal rectangular ad unit at the top of the page generally performs well, followed by ads within the content and along the sides.
Large ads that make it difficult to read the content can be a poor user experience.
Be aware of the kinds of ads shown on your site in order to catch and block annoying ads.
Listen to site visitors if they complain about specific ads, and follow up with them to understand why they’re having a problem with those ads.
13. Add A Convincing Call-To-Action
A call-to-action (CTA) should be clearly visible on a website.
The user should be able to locate this within the first few seconds of being on a page.
A CTA should also be compelling so that a user is enticed to click on it.
The colors used, the fonts, the verbiage, etc. are all elements that can make a large impact on whether a person clicks.
14. Limit Broken Links
A large number of broken links will only create a poor user experience, leaving a visitor to a website dissatisfied and frustrated if they cannot locate the content that they want to find.
There are a few different ways to locate all of the broken links on a website, such as through Google Search Console or through a site auditing tool such as Screaming Frog.
15. Focus On An Internal Link Strategy
Focus on increasing the likelihood of a user staying on your site by using internal links to keep a user there.
This helps to let users easily navigate to what section of a website they are looking for, and keep their overall user experience enjoyable.
16. Ensure That Links Open On A New Tab
When creating a sound internal linking strategy and linking to other pages on a site, it is important to remember to ensure that those links open in a tab.
This helps to potentially increase the time a user spends on a site since they will have multiple pages open at once.
17. Create A 404 Page That Is Helpful
A 404 page should communicate that a page was not found and also provide alternative webpages for a user to navigate to.
This will help to lower the bounce rate by helping users find what they are looking for.
18. Publish New Content Frequently
Creating fresh content consistently that can offer users a wide variety of topics to explore can be helpful in order to convince people to visit and stay on a site.
19. Display Credibility
Visitors are always looking for how trustworthy a site seems.
When visitors land on your website, they are going through an examination of the content and assessing how reliable it seems.
As a way to help build credibility and increase trust with visitors, it is a good idea to include positive reviews of whatever products and/or services your site features.
Showcase any special seals, and make the site secure in order to help a user trust a site, and thus, decrease the likelihood of them bouncing.
20. Utilize Google Analytics & Other Tools
Several tools can help you when tracking user engagement.
Google Analytics can track:
- Time on site.
- Bounce rate.
- Pages per session.
- Most frequently and least frequently visited pages.
- And much more.
Track User Experience with Microsoft Clarity
Other tools like the free Microsoft Clarity can provide heat mapping and visitor recording so that you can see exactly what a user did during a session.
You can view how users react to pages and then adjust and test changes on those pages accordingly.
Increase User Satisfaction
Increase site visitor engagement by diagnosing the reason for high bounce rates then using those insights to improve the site visitor’s user experience.
Optimize based on findings identified by Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity so that avoidable high bounce rates can be avoided.
The end result will be a website that users enjoy which is exactly what Google prefers to rank.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Bakhtiar Zein/Shutterstock
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
–
There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
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