If you’re new to social media you might not have heard about bounce rates, but you might have heard that it’s bad to have a high one. The things is, it’s not always such a terrible thing.

What’s a Bounce Rate

A bounce rate is when some lands on a page on your website, and then they don’t click through to any other content, they read the content they landed on and they leave again.

Obviously you ideally want to keep your readers on your site as long as possible, clicking through to more content and hopefully converting them to being one of your subscribers, or at least a returning reader.

Why it isn’t always a big deal

There are cases where it’s not such a terrible thing to have a high bounce rate, for example if you’re running a blog that offers tutorials chances are a high percentage of users are going to arrive on a certain page on your blog via a search engine, they get the information they need and they leave again. Same for sites that mostly offer reviews.

Like I said, in cases like this having a high bounce rate isn’t the end of the world, it makes logical sense why the bounce rate is so high. But, there are still things you can do to try and decrease the bounce rate.

How to decrease your Bounce Rate

If you have a particular post or two that are getting a lot of hits and they’re the source of your high bounce rate then it could be worth creating more content that focuses on a similar topic.

Once you’ve created some highly focused related content you want to make sure that the posts that are getting the hits are linking out to this fresh content. Ideally you’ll want to use a combination of related posts at the bottom of the posts content and/or in the side bar, as well as scattering some links within the content. For the links in your content try and make them fit seamlessly with the rest of the post, for example if I wanted to link this post to a similar article then I’d add in a sentence somewhere that makes reference to this other post including a link to it.