Do long articles help to reduce bounce rate?

[johnbrent609]

Bounce rate my blog sites are high, so my question is I need to create more long Do long articles to reduce bounce rate? I think long articles can keep the readers stay longer on my blogs. What are your ways? Please share your advice.

 

[vishwa]

It depends on the objective of your article. Sometimes it does not necessary to write down a long article. You can describe the topic in minimum of 500 to 600 words. But as I say it depends on your topics and its objectives. I don't think that long articles can help you to reduce your site bounce rate. Bounce rate depends on lots of factors. For example you can decrease your bounce rate by interlinking your articles, add relevant images to your posts, Use responsive themes, make your site browsing easy, Providing fresh and relevant content to the users, frequently update your blog/website etc..

 

[ulterios]

Some nice input from vishwa. Interlinking related articles can greatly improve the time a visitor spends on your site. It also helps to have good quality related images in the posts.

Another thing to think about is that if you make your posts too long then someone might get tired or reading it and leave. You have to find a good balance of length and relevant content. Depending on what you are writing about, 400-600 words is usually a good target. However, sometimes it will need to be longer to include all the needed content.

You can try to spice up your articles a little to help people want to keep reading them. Some good information, some humor or funny comment, or anything else that might keep their attention.

 

[Ron Killian]

Ron Killian

That is the key. It's not about length or how many words. More than enough crappy short articles on the web and more than enough crappy long articles on the web.

Yes you gotta keep them reading, give them reasons to read on, make them want to read on. What ever. Not that I am a pro writer, far from it.

Long form content seems to be all the rage in the blog-o-shere these days. Course most people are saying the search engines love all those words. I am not an SEO expert, so I am not going to comment. But I don't know if I buy it.

Also, for me personally, I tend to get bored or tired reading really long articles. Maybe it's just me. It has to be pretty interesting or entertaining to keep me reading.

Plus, if we give all this juicy content away for free (long articles), what's left to buy?

One page of valuable content can be worth $1,000's. One 200 page crap ebook can be worth nothing.

One last thought, if you are writing long articles, what about writing more and create an ebook. Then you have something to sell

 

[Cherin]

It all depends on the content you are using. If the content is unique and easy to understand then it will definitely effect the bounce rate. Article with some generic keywords with meaningful content helps you to get good ranking.

 

[Mike001]

It very much depends on the content and credibility of the article. If the article is well written and contains interesting and new information the viewer will normally stay to complete the article. So in that sense the longer the article the lower your bounce rate should be.

But keep in mind that if you are running a Blog type web site, when they see the article and select to read more or however you have it worded that number should not be included in the Bounce Rate. They have left the initial page and navigated to the article page. Depending upon how you have configured your site statistics, once they leave the landing page, or home page they are now on the site.

I have mine set up that once they are in the site and off the landing page that is counted as a true visit. It is kind of hard to explain but it is an algorithm that I have set up.

The key is to capture the attention on the landing page and get the visitor interested in viewing what is in the site. But you don't want to overwhelm with information on the landing page either. TMI (Too Much Information) can turn them off also.It is a delicate balance that we are constantly tweaking.

I hope this helps.

 

[learn2do]

What is the different between long and short articles when your website's bounce rate is high? Your problem is visitors come to your site and they exit without access any articles, or they find out an article through Search Engine, spend an hour reading it then just exit. So if you want to reduce the bounce rate, work with the structure of website: site's interface, loading time, categories, interesting title, related content in each article etc.

 

[SEOPub]

The length of time they stay on your site has nothing to do with bounce rate.

 

[Mike001]

SEO,

According to Google, the bounce rate is "the percentage of visitors that navigate away from your website after visiting only one page".

Since normally that one page is the landing page, or home page, that is what we were basing our comments to John.

 

[johnbrent609]

The length of time they stay on your site has nothing to do with bounce rate.

Can you elaborate on this?

SEO,

According to Google, the bounce rate is "the percentage of visitors that navigate away from your website after visiting only one page".

Since normally that one page is the landing page, or home page, that is what we were basing our comments to John.

I thought it was average time for all pages that visitors came your site, not just one page.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

No. Bounce rate has nothing to do with time on the site. It is just measuring how many people visit your site and leave without visiting any other pages.

Whether or not a high bounce rate is good or bad depends on the situation. For example, if I have a landing page with an affiliate link I want people to click on and go buy something, than a high bounce rate might mean they are doing exactly that. Not a bad thing at all.

 

[Mike001]

John,

The bounce rate is calculated on a single page visit. Or at least that is the way that it has always been in the past. If you think about it, it makes sense. At the time the stat was started it was to attempt to measure the accuracy of the search engine algorithms. After all, Goggle wrote and invented the stat and they were trying to improve their search algorithms.

The belief was that is you performed a search for a particular topic and found that topical search was accurate you visited and moved around the site with the successful search.

If you immediately left the site the topical search was believed to be inaccurate and that was the reason that you left. Keep in mind that this was quite a while ago that this stat was started and that statistical factor has evolved tremendously since the original inception. In the old days there were not 10 of millions of articles on a single topic and the web had not grown to a MEGA-STORE environment. Where you have content based solely appearance.

Now there are many more factors to consider when looking at a bounce rate because of all the competition in the same topical space. Now not only do you need to have great content, it must also be attractive, attention getting, load quickly, be different and accurate.

But getting back to your main question, according to the guys that wrote the original algorithm, it is the percentage of users that navigate off the website from the page they landed on without opening any additional site pages or links.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

I'm sorry, but this is not true. Bounce rate was never a part of Google's algorithm. In fact, when the search engine was released (1998), there was no such thing as Google Analytics. Analytics was not released until 2005. They did not have any bounce rate data. Even today, they do not know the bounce rate of the majority of pages on the internet.

Also, there is no reason to think that a "bounce" is a bad thing from Google's perspective. Not browsing other pages on the site is not really a negative.

If I do a search for something like "the cast of captain america: civil war" and find a page that gives me that information but I do not visit any other page on that site, that does not mean the search result was bad. I found exactly what I was looking for.

Now, what can be bad is not a bounce but what most people refer to as pogo'ing.

Using the same example above, let's say I click on the first result. Then I click the back button to go back to the Google SERP and I click on another result. Now that could be a sign to Google that I did not find what I was looking for on the first page because I went back to the search results and picked another result, and that is data that they do have because it happens on their site.

 

[WebmasterPhil]

Hard to give an honest answer. It depends. Some people prefer short articles, while others prefer long. The general consensus for the longest time is that viewers normally scan web pages before reading it. This is a usability concern so the best thing to do is make sure your web page is user-friendly to the eye.. that is use, use plenty of white spacing between chunks of your text while eliminating annoying flashing ads on the side.

 

[Mike001]

First off, its a bounce rate we have been discussing, not a bonus rate. The original question was if longer articles could capture the attention of his visitors and help decrease his bounce rate.

The discussions on this forum tend to have a lot of input from some very knowledgeable people in their respective fields, it is not unusual that we explore many different areas of a question, especially if you get a lot people involved in brain storming the true nature of a solution. That is what many of the more experienced people do here. That is one of the reasons why this board is so popular and beneficial to the users.

Getting many different opinions and a lot of different input helps all of us see things about the particular question that may have been missed with just one or two responses.

We also try to remember that we were all noobs at one time, and learning this technology. How nice it would have been back then to have a resource like this to assist me with the thousands of questions that I had.

 

[Mike001]

SEOPub,

Thank you for the clarification. I was basing my response on the original white paper from Google explaining the analytic properties and how they are used and calculated. Granted that was an older White Paper and I had not read over it in many years, but the way I explained it was the way I remember it being explained.

I will dig it out and send it to you through PM once I locate it.

Your explanation does make more sense though, especially the way sites are designed now. Much different then they were just a few short years ago. I think the last time I read that white paper was about 4 years ago as I was developing a class for UNC. Which brings up another good point, I definitely need to do some additional research on this as we have a class that is taught and some of the older techniques are still discussed.

Thanks for the information,

 

[DonaldLyons]

It is absolutely correct that bounce rate shows the real presence of your site. Unique content helps in improving ranking due to which the bounce rate can reduce. The following things matter when you write the content in form of article while you are building links for this

Title of the content- It should be easily understandable & convincing message for the readers;
Article Length- The body content should be of 500-600 words.
Add Multimedia- Images & Videos that you should use only for niche content;
Add two links- One for promotion & another from descriptive/wikipedia
Increase userbase if needed.
Add more tags/keywords
Anchor Link to keyword (Promotional) - You should follow the tagline keywords, not exact keyword

By all these, you can submit your article on High PR sites. Thus, you can reduce bounce rate of your website.

 

[alexraymonds]

I think the bounce rate depends on your content very much, not depend much with the length of the article. However, I think that the length of content will help attract more traffic to your website.

 

[Rob Whisonant]

I take really long articles and break them up into multiple pages. This keeps the reader clicking and staying on the site. It also gets the back button further from the search engine they came from.

 

[Jesse]

Not only long article but also you need interesting, usefull information in it. It will help to reduce bounce rate ..

 

[Horus]

Yes and no. Depends on the quality and the purpose of the content that you're using. if your content is Unique and really good then you will achieve what you're setting out to do. If your article is long and not interesting then it won't really count (you can use article writers to help you to get quality content)

 

[sweetsdailyupdates]

If you don't created unique and informative article so it doesn't matter if you are creating long article or short article. User will bounce back.

The user always take some ideas from your title, so create your title more informative. Create sort and sweet article. User always want solution if you don't have solution, they will bounce back so create article with important points with some specific images.