In my last post, I talked about my concerns regarding the high bounce rate on my photoblog. In this post, I want to talk about some of the things I have learnt while researching why my bounce rate is so high.
Make sure that you’re calculating your bounce rate correctly
While reading about bounce rates, I came to the realization that I wasn’t calculating my my website’s bounce rate correctly. Since this is a photoblog most of my return visitors would only look at a single page and therefore be considering a bounced visit (Remember, Google Analytics defines a bounced visitor as any visitor who views only one page.) So I needed a way to segment my traffic and only look at new visitors. Luckily, for me Google Analytics makes that easy. Here’s my new graph showing the bounce rate for new visitors only.
So it’s a slightly better result than before, but you can clearly see that I still have a bounce rate around 66% which means that I still have some work to do.
Search Engines may not deliver the highest “quality” of traffic to a photoblog
After looking at the “true” bounce rate of my photoblog, I decided that it was important to identify all the sources of traffic that my site is receiving and which sites are sending “high quality” traffic. I quickly realized that while the majority of the traffic is coming from Google (namely, Google Images) most of it is not what I would consider to be “high quality” traffic.
My definition of “high quality” traffic would be a visit with at least two pageviews.
I need to generate better traffic to my site
My goal has always been to sell limited edition prints via my photoblog, and while there are tons of other things that still need to be done in order to reach that goal, I am a strong believer in the value of high quality traffic and how it’s vitally important to the overall success of my photoblog. As it stands right now, the organic search traffic that I receive is unfocused at best and needs to be dramatically redefined if I have any chance at meeting my goals. So I have pulled up the trusty spreadsheet tool and turned to Google’s Keyword tool and will be spending a fair amount of my time researching keywords. I will let you know how it goes.
8 responses so far ↓
Great post. I’m curious to see the results of your keyword research as I’m trying to spend some time doing the same.
@marc: Will be posting more information as I gather it…stay tuned…and thanks for taking the time to comment.
Your bounce rate is much better than mine. I have always suspected that my high bounce rate may have a lot to do with my poor blog design. I’m hiring a designer to create a new design for me. My goal is to simplify the hell out of everything. =)
I always want to link to everything under the sun. I’m cutting waaaay back on page clutter, though. I’m also planning to prominently feature my most popular posts at the bottom of every page. Hopefully that makes a difference. =)
@Eric: I think that poor blog design has a bearing on bounce rate…I’ve often thought that my blog could use with a brush up as well….Let us know the before and after bounce rates. Good Luck!
[...] few posts back I was talking about the high bounce rate I was seeing on my photoblog, and that one of my ideas on lower the bounce rate was to increase the [...]
I feel that if you want to have your average visitor view 2 pages you need to significantly restructure your site. Having someone enter your site through the stream of a blog is like trying to introduce someone to baseball through using a page of box scores. You will lose the interest of a lot of newcomers.
Try using a web/blog site. The ones I do for clients have a more traditional (but still WordPress) main page used for orientation and presentation, before dumping into the blog.
By starting with the blog table as your main page you must hope that what you have put up as you recent post is appealing to the new visitors for that period. Your your main pages to showcase and interest your best stuff.
That is what I do for people who want blog/websites for marketing purposes. And i get 2+
I would be tempted to see what would happen if the layout were changed.
Dump the latest posts on the right, it is redundant.
Instead of running the visuals across the top run them down one side or between posts to lead eyes and fingers into the site.
Generally almost everyone considers themselves to be a photographer of some kind. Photography is visual as you well know and people want eye candy to feed on. However what this means to me is you may be getting bounces from casual shooters who are looking for tips or toys for their photography which once seeing your focus sends them back up the rabbit hole.
The only other thing you can do is post more often.
D
Hey David, thanks for the tips – much appreciated! I am working on posting more often, too many projects (or procrastination)
Take care,
Brett