The Normal Bounce Rate Range for a Blog



Barry
What's considered a normal bounce rate for a blog?
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Truslow πŸŽ“
It depends upon the purpose and how it's set up really. Are they just informational blog posts – like say a newspaper type site? Bounce rate is pretty high for those because you get the article you wanted, read it and go on to the next thing. Unless you can present them with something else that catches their eye they are gone… happy and satisfied, but gone.
If the posts are informational and designed to drive sales once they learn about the thing – then it should be much lower. But what is that number? If it's a $20 gizmo, then you want a lot of people to convert. If it's a $2M automated pick and sort system for a warehouse, it will likely be higher since that's more of an impulse buy and selling two or three a year is enough to keep you in business.
If your goal is some other click and you've got a 95% bounce rate then yeah… it's a problem. I've got a few clients with things in the range of 75-80% bounce rates and they are happy. The get a positive brand impression either way, and the thing they are going for is not something that a mere "interest" is necessarily an indicator that they want to "buy". You may have simply put them a step closer so that the next time they move forward in their long buying process, you're on their list of folks to check back with.
So ultimately, as with most SEO questions, the answer here is: It depends.

Barry ✍️
Truslow they are 15 info articles that will eventually point to a target commercial pages (6 total articles per silo). I think the content is pretty engaging, but I'm biased since I put a lot of time & effort into them.
Truslow πŸŽ“
So they will "eventually" have purpose but for now they just are there. Sounds like they'll probably bounce a lot until they get their purpose.
Barry ✍️
Truslow your comments are well-said. I appreciate the insights!

Den Mark
It depends on how catchy and informative your content is when a user saw it in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and clicks on it to view and read. So, if your content gives important information from the title to the first 3-5 sentences in the content, the user would probably stay longer. I would say 40% to 60% is normal. Again, depends on how catchy, long, and informative your content is. But if your content is only catchy but does not contain important info, then it would have higher Bounce rate around 70% to 89%. But you should keep in mind that Bounce rate does not only tell you that users are not interested in your content, some times higher Bounce rates are caused by user experience. So, you might also want to check on all of your pages speed.
I hope this helps 😊

Barry ✍️
Den Mark page speed is good, but I may need to revamp some of the intros. I have good feature photo with text, then short intro before a list of jump links to H2 sections.

Lancheres
Bounce rate is an interesting metric that can sometimes help to identify poorly performing pages however as others have mentioned, it's all relative.
I believe the big distinction is: Are the users bouncing back to Google to search & click on another site OR are they bouncing off because the completed the objective.
1. If you have a contact page and it's objective is to deliver an address/phone number, then a bounce rate of 100% can be acceptable as it accomplishes it's objective.
However!
2. If you have an informational page on vitamin C benefits, people click on your page, find nothing of value and then return to Google search results to click on a competitor's site, that's where the bounce rate should be addressed.
Unfortunately that means that bounce rate is likely better measured on a page by page basis (query basis).
Just for fun, I can tell you that for a purely information site, I found that having a bounce rate lower than 60% suggests that your site is fairly sticky however once again, this is going to be related to your industry and in comparison with your competitors.
These days I focus on making sure my users find the information they are looking for so they don't click back to Google. I do this by locating all the pages that have a 90%+ bounce rate and then optimizing the header / top half of the page to lure the users into scrolling down.

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Barry ✍️
Lancheres great input, thanks! 😎
Steve Toth πŸŽ“ Β» Lancheres
Great answer! Any fast tips for optimizing the top half of the page to lure users in?
Lancheres Β» Steve Toth
Ideally, you'd want to enter the conversation that's already happening your in prospect's mind and start writing from that point on…
So if your prospect is looking for vitamin C benefits, your article would start with: "I went through 236 clinical case studies on vitamin C and compiled the benefits of vitamin C, here they are"
Skipping the generic BS at the start an article and diving right into pertinent information is useful.
My more generic tricks are: Fast loading site, small header (have the prospect dive right into the content rather than having a huge header image+ads) and I absolutely LOVE have unique, bespoke imagery at the top. So many sites are using generic stock art so if your site has a unique image of a table, or proof that you did the work, then you stand above all the other tabs that might be open on someone's computer.
Whenever I search for something, I nearly always open 3-4 tabs. I know my users are likely doing the same so I don't take my readers for granted and instead, I assume I'm competiting against 3-4 other tabs from my competitors. Finally, if it's a BIG piece of content, then having a readable table of content really helps.
Steve Toth πŸŽ“ Β» Lancheres
Thank you!

Bergen
You should also take a quick look into the "performance" tab of Google search console and check out the inbound search queries for that page that are driving in traffic.
Sometimes we find there's searches which are partially matching to things mentioned in the article that aren't as relevant to the topic as a whole. A percentage of that traffic might be coming in for the wrong things which inflates your bounce rate.
If you identify a high percentage of search queries are not a great match for the page in question, you might need to optimize the content further for relevance and clarity (headers, summarization, bullet points)
You don't necessarily want to modify the content in that case all the time, but you can check to see if there's any on-page optimizations you can make to tip that more favorably to relevant queries -or- consider de-optimizing the content for instances of search terms you are seeing as irrelevant.
A good example is, we put out a blog post about event marketing that referenced an event as an example scenario. But a year later when it came time for that actual event, there was very little content about it online so we ended up getting quite a lot of traffic for an event we weren't hosting… so naturally the bounce rate was through the roof.
Sutch
The usual SEO answer. It depends. It depends on what you want you visitors to do once they arrive on your blog. I look at dwell time as a bigger signal. If your visitor has found the answer to their search and spend time reading your post then bounce is not an issue. If you are trying to encourage an action then more work is needed in your conversion optimisation.
AndrΓ©
I have a blog with an average bounce rate of 90%, but users are spending an average time on page of 30 minutes. The blog is 100% informational, and, in this case, I believe since the users found what they were looking for, they bounced back (recently, I adjusted the bounce rate with a timer on Tag Manager). On the other hand, if my intent was to get the users to navigate to another page to convert them, the bounce rate is a very important metric. This is how I see the bounce rate.



They said that a High Bounce Rate is Not Always Bad



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