High Traffic is not Equal to Money – What is Bounce Rate
During my first few learning days about SEO, I was concentrating on increasing the traffic to my site. I’ve read that in order to increase your site’s traffic you can do SEO techniques like using high ranking keywords, commenting on other blogsites with the same niche, submitting your articles to directories or even participating in forums. Sure these techniques all work out and I’ve seen a modest growth in my traffic. However I ain’t blind not to see the real conditions of having high traffic to my website. High traffic is not equal to money.
One key indicator that I am losing the battle even with a high traffic is the bounce rate. After a week of doing these so called “fool proof” SEO tips, I realized that the bounce rate just keeps getting higher even if my page views are increasing. For those who do not know, the bounce rate is the proportion of people visiting your site but has moved on to the next result page.
What does it mean if you have a high bounce rate?
I’ve read before in one blogsite that the ideal bounce rate is supposed to be 0%. I am getting 56% during the first week and I guess that was bad. If you have a high bounce rate it means that the visitors did not actually pay attention to any of your contents in the site. It just so happen that they clicked the link to your site but did not find what they are looking for. It is like going to the rest room as a male. When you open the door and sees women inside, you will say ooopps, you immediately bounce away (unless you are a pervert), close the door and simply go to the next door. So the higher the bounce rate is, the shorter your visitors stay on your site. The shorter they stay on your site, the lesser the time your articles and contents are exposed to them, and you do not have to expect any ad clicks on your site especially if you are dependent on Adsense.
So what is the solution to increase my traffic and at the same time increase my earnings?
Consider the old saying: quality content is the key. If you can sacrifice your hunger for traffic in exchange of writing quality contents, then sooner or later you will gather loyal readers. With loyal reader you will have greater referrals. With greater referrals means greater page views and traffic. Of course you already know what comes next. I am not saying that doing SEO is obsolete. In fact, I suggest that you do writing quality contents + SEO.
So now you see that high traffic is not equal to money. The next time you rejoice over that 200% increase in your traffic, try to take a look at your bounce rate first. This will give you the real profitability of your website. Right now I have a bounce rate of 42% and I’m planning to drop it down to 0%. not impossible right? If you like this article, please leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Keep in mind that true SEO techniques take longer than two weeks to really pay off. Having said that though you should try and incorporate them in every post you do.Reply
Remember the goal of a search engine is to provide its users with the content they want and not just fluff. So a good search engine like google ttries to find the content most relevant to the users search. So again content is king.
As you increase the quality of your content, you will decrease your bounce rate. If you increase the quality of your traffic while keeping search engine optimization techniques in mind it will pay off.
Now ad placement is another thing we should talk about at some point. From what I see of this post it looks like your page is over saturated with ads. That tends to drive a user away from clicking on them. I assume from your post you are keeping track of your stats. So you you should really be digging into which ads on your site are getting clicks. The ones that are not getting clicks I would remove.
Hope this helps, just passing along what I have learned.
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Comment by Ben — October 31, 2009 @ 2:07 pm
Hi Ben your comment here is truly valuable. I am still new in blogging and would really appreciate getting these kinds of info from experienced persons. Thanks for the tips.
Comment by riantalk — October 31, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
Hmm just to add, traffic is gained by making posts about what people are searching. It requires you to do some research on what is hot or not. SEO is only needed if you want the top results in search engines (which of course we want).
Bounce rate can be decreased if you make several related posts on a topic where a person can read more about the topic in your blog. ^_^
Comment by Allen — November 1, 2009 @ 1:10 am