It is a very common case: your website has a few articles on a given topic which perform well in search, attract qualified traffic and are shared on social platforms. However, your bounce rate is high; which means visitors who land on those pages leave after reading the articles instead of exploring more of your website and ultimately moving to the converting pages. Could you be doing more with this content, considering it is so popular?
This article will give you useful tips to optimise your most popular web content for conversion.
First, assess the extent of the problem.
- Check your best-performing landing pages over a period to see if your popular content has a high bounce rate.
If you want to check all landing pages with topic 1, in your Google Analytics account go to BEHAVIOUR>SITE CONTENT>LANDING PAGES and then write /topic1 in the ”advanced” filter; this will return data about the performance of all landing pages dealing with topic 1 over a chosen period (for example one year).
Let us say, you get something like this:
http://www.example.com/topic1/post1
has recorded 12,811 sessions with bounce rate 93.32%
http://www.example.com/topic1/post2
has recorded 3,891 sessions with a bounce rate of 93.65%
http://www.example.com/topic1/post3
has recorded 2,614 session with a bounce rate of 95,10% .
- Then do the same search over the last 30 days to see if the data is still similar. Let us imagine you get results like in the example below for the same landing pages:
http://www.example.com/topic1/post1
http://www.example.com/topic1/post2
has recorded 236 sessions with a bounce rate of 93.64%
http://www.example.com/topic1/post3
has recorded 327 sessions with a bounce rate of 93.27%.
All three landing pages have continued to attract visits in recent weeks, which means that the topic remains interesting even if it is no longer new, though bounce rate remains high. This is content which should be better optimised. Of course, the real point here is: where do you want to take your visitors after reading your most popular pages? It is up to you to create paths inside your website which turn visitors into leads with only a few easy passages.
Here are a few possibilities.
- Create a dedicated section. Topic 1 is obviously popular and it deserves a section for itself: a page or a sub-page. A dedicated section would give these pages more visibility for both human visitors and search engines; it would drive more traffic to the website and improve ranking.
- Related contents on your website.Think about other pages that people interested in that piece of content will want to see, and link to them throughout the content and at the end either in a “if you liked this, you’ll love this” or “related posts” kind of way or by means of anchors which will use relevant keywords.
- Allow comments. This will increase engagement and returning visits.
- Have links to author page at the bottom of each article instead of just the author name and e-mail.
- Create links using keywords as anchors. Links encourage visitors to navigate through pages and read more; this will take them to the converting pages of the website, increase engagement and decrease bounce rate.
- Look at ways you could provide more in-depth information in popular articles (e.g. videos). This will keep visitors on the page long enough to notice that there is more to your website without just immediately leaving.
Is your website properly optimised for conversion? is your bounce rate too high? Call Giuseppe Baggiani now on +44 (0)1822 813041