How to lower Bounce rate?

[fredrikse]

Hi,

I've been looking at the bounce rate on my forum. It's pretty high in some areas. Any ideas how I can lower the rate and make people stay longer? I would like to start and use Google Analytics to work out some sort of strategy for keywords and content.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Controlling bounce rate on user generated content is difficult. It all depends on your niche.

The single best thing you can do in communities, is change thread titles to correctly reflect the first posts content. Do that, you improve the accuracy of content to title ratio, thus you increase the likelihood the content is shown to the right searcher.

 

[fredrikse]

Controlling bounce rate on user generated content is difficult. It all depends on your niche.

The single best thing you can do in communities, is change thread titles to correctly reflect the first posts content. Do that, you improve the accuracy of content to title ration, thus you increase the likelihood the content is shown to the right searcher.

That's a very good idea. I'm positioned in the aviation segment. Very often my users write very short thread titles. So it would make sense for me to start en go through all threads and correcting the titles where necessary?

Would it be a good idea to write articles on different subjects that would maybe rank higher in the search engine?

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Would it be a good idea to write articles on different subjects that would maybe rank higher in the search engine?

That's exactly what you want to do, yes. If there are specific phrases used in Google for your niche, then writing dedicated pages about that phrase is how you get listed for those phrases. What you do is then link from other posts, as posted, that use that phrase /similar phrase to the created page. Those internal keyword links will boost your rankings significantly, especially for long-tail terms (those not searched much).

 

[Fred.]

It won't lower your bouncerate.
But if you haven't already you can install Better Analytics to see a more accurate bounce rate.
My bounce rate went from 63% to 17 %

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/better-analytics.2288/

 

[fredrikse]

It won't lower your bouncerate.
But if you haven't already you can install Better Analytics to see a more accurate bounce rate.
My bounce rate went from 63% to 17 %

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/better-analytics.2288/

Thanks for the info. Based on what did your bounce rate drop that much?

 

[Fred.]

My bounce rate didn't drop. I just use a more accurate measure method.

check out this post
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/better-analytics.58746/page-10#post-889701

 

[CallieJo]

Hi,

I've been looking at the bounce rate on my forum. It's pretty high in some areas. Any ideas how I can lower the rate and make people stay longer? I would like to start and use Google Analytics to work out some sort of strategy for keywords and content.

To help people stay on your website longer, there are a few things that might help:

• Similar Threads (So people have more topics to explore on the same subject matter)
• Internal site linking. When you create a new thread, link to other content within your website. Internal site linking is one of the easiest ways to help promote more page views.

 

[fredrikse]

Similar Threads (So people have more topics to explore on the same subject matter)

I'm running an aviation forum and it's divided into several sections with quite a lot of content.

Internal site linking. When you create a new thread, link to other content within your website. Internal site linking is one of the easiest ways to help promote more page views.

Thanks for the tip. As a moderator I could back to old post and create links out of words/sentences to appropriate content elsewhere on my site? Will Google for instance premiere that?

 

[CallieJo]

I'm running an aviation forum and it's divided into several sections with quite a lot of content.

There is an option to create similar threads from the same forum. That should help you keep similar threads on topic within each forum.

Thanks for the tip. As a moderator I could back to old post and create links out of words/sentences to appropriate content elsewhere on my site? Will Google for instance premiere that?

IMHO, internal link building will help your members. Your members are the most important.

As far as google, here is a snip from a recent article on whether or not webmasters should build links:

Should Webmasters Engage in Any Kind of Link Building?

Some people are honestly afraid to link between pages on their sites, or between subdomains and root domains, because they have been misled about the kinds of links search engines punish.

And here is a good article on bounce rate.