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17 Comments

SEO is finally getting us traffic, high bounce tho

So, I have a business in Brazil, and we started our blog 5 months ago. We've tried getting backlinks, but was too much effort, so we just kept creating new content targeting low competition keywords based on Ahrefs.

The results were a bit meh until last month when something just clicked and we started to rank on several keywords. Now we're getting around 3k clicks/month.

The downside, though, is that our bounce skyrocket, we had 40~50% before the SEO kicked in and now we're at 75%. Our website is fast and our blog is pretty clean, I'm not really sure if there's a problem on our side.

We're planning to add CTA's and Widgets to entice users to create a free account. Has anyone here had the same problem? If so what worked best for you? Sidebar CTA? CTA in the middle of the blog post? Or anything else, I would love to know, looking at the 75% bounce rate in GA is making me feel like I'm losing a lot of potentials customers.

  1. 2

    This might not be the case but let me tell you..
    Try to switch up to a better actionable content or case studies. Blogs with content like this tend to have a low bounce rate.
    Don't just fill your blog with lots of content in order to get backlinks.

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      We actually have 0 backlinks 😂 they're too hard to get. Thanks for the tip!

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        What do you mean "hard to get"?

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          It's hard to make people link your content in the Brazilian market in my experience.

          For English based is easier imo, at smartforms.dev we got a lot of backlinks organically.

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    Blogs tend to have a higher bounce rate, compare to say, e-commerce stores, since they find the story they're interested in, digest it, and move on (high bounce).

    Things that can help you on your blog would be to implement side-ways cross promoting your other content through "related articles", "featured posts", "people that read this may also like" sections.

    1. 1

      I'm planning on adding more cross promotions, at the moment we only have related articles at the very bottom. Thanks for your answer!

  3. 2

    I might be able to help you, what's your blog?

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    I'm not an expert on this but,
    If people come to get knowledge and they bounce, it means that they didn't get the answer they want.
    So I don't see how a Cta would make them stay.
    The issue here might just be the content.

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      Does it really mean that? Or maybe they get the answer and just move on. I think it's the second option because I'm tracking the time spent reading and the scroll on the articles, but I'll investigate further. Thanks for your answer!

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        Content is the problem.

        Fix your content and your bounce rate will go down I promise.

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          That's actually the mistake I've seen most of my clients face.

          In someway they know way too much and lots of "technical and industry jargon" are in the content to make it look "professional".

          The goal is to make it simple and enjoyable enough to read.

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          The thing is, our niche is in edtech, and the person who writes the content has deep knowledge about the subject. So if the content is the problem we're doomed 😂

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      That's maybe it, we're on a small niche(we help students on a specific exam here in Brazil), but our keywords are more for knowledge seeking people rather than intent-driven.

      Do you have any idea if this is the case?

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    I would add in Keyword Hero, at least the free version. https://keyword-hero.com/

    Secondly, overall bounce isn't that big a deal. Segment by pages/keywords and find out from which specific places are people bouncing in high numbers. Blogs will always bounce a lot more than other things. Then target that to figure out your CTA or if you should rewrite content for that user group.

    For example. Let's say your business is "Marketing Services For Entrepreneurs", and you are getting traffic from the keyword "marketing my product" and your blog post is "101 Ways to Market Your New Product". Then that is the people to focus on. CTAs could be signing up for a video course or joining a discord channel where other people are figuring out marketing, etc. etc.

    Basically, I would recommend looking into the details instead of just the high level bounce rate.

    1. 1

      That's a great idea, I'll do that, thanks for the tip.

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