Driving targeted traffic to your site: 3-5% bounce rate!
Targeting a site’s readership, especially when one has a blog, is not an easy task. On going over some websites, I have seen that many would publish their level of hits or visits in one day. Some are pretty awesome when imagining some 30,000 visits in one day. Everybody would dream of that. This would mean huge monetisation programmes, nice level of side income, “influence” and all that goes with it. When delving into SEO and community management, one has to take into consideration another parameter, which might actually be a better indicator than the level of traffic. This indicator is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is what really defines the success of a website. If people are entering and leaving your site in less than 5 seconds, you might need to have a serious talk with you community management and your SEO experts.
Bounce rate fluctuations.
You might have noticed that a bounce rate can either fluctuate a lot on a website or stay put over a long period of time. This goes with the quality of your traffic. Most of the time, the fluctuations will be of more or less 10%. Higher fluctuations and, at that, frequent ones mean that there might be something weird happening on your website. Even if these are not what you would first look at, I sincerely think that important bounce fluctuations should be used as alerts on the health of a website.
3-5% Bounce rate?
Now, you might have come here to see if it can really be done? The answer is “yes”. This very blog, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, has been set up to do this. After the first weeks of its launch I tried to find a way of making this site stand out. There were too many odds against it as there is no real web design community in Mauritius but the idea was to get to that very small web engaged community out there. And it worked! The aim was to target that specific traffic and this is what is happening today. Below is a screenshot of one year’s publications. 3.19% bounce rate over a whole year.
The secret…
Actually, there’s no secret to this specific rate at all. It all goes in what you will read on all “how to blog” sites out there. Write for your targeted audience and keep it for them, not even search engines, the rest will follow. It is the only thing I did. What about you? What is your bounce rate and how are you working with/on it?
I’ve been warned that this would not last long once I get more traffic coming. Anyway, so far so good and it’ll be good till it lasts.
Category: Search Engine Optimisation
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I am adopting a targeted strategy for my blog as well. I am advertising it on political pages on Facebook but my bounce rate is still 70%. :s I dunno why (and I have a different analytics code for the MBL)
As I said Bruno, the whole point is to write on the subject all the time. I don’t really advertise on Facebook even if I’ve got all the community running over there. The target is very fine and small. You’ll need to hit it even more precisely I think. This will also be interesting if you interact with other bloggers in your specific field.
Ok I see. Unfortunately Mauritian political blogs are very scarce, and get traffic only during electoral campaigns, and physics is not that popular in Mauritius. Maybe I should go international.
Actually, Kurt Avish did this with Island Crisis. His secret is that he went international since the very beginning. This is what makes his traffic higher than the normal niche blog. I had the possibility also but, just like you, few people appreciate in depth web design and marketing analysis.
Huh. I tend to get lost each time by looking for the comment box below the comments lol. Ok back to the topic:
Impressive stats you got. Keep it up. I think I never got less than 50% bounce rate :S My average these days is around 50 to 60 according to G.A.
But maybe that;s also due to the ads around.
@bruno: Your niche is politics and physics and by keeping it only to Mauritius you are limiting the growth. Politics in Mu works only when there is a major event or scandal which is rare. In your case maybe targeting the world itself as one single market will be better. Write for the PHYSICS community and not for the Mauritian Physics Community only.
Having the comment box up here incites people to comment when they do not want to read all the other comments. This actually works. There’s practically no post over the last months that hasn’t got any comment now.
I also see that you are stressing on the fact that Mauritian communities are too small when talking about niches. True enough, one can write for the Mauritian community but the strategy should be more global than ever to reach a larger public.
Absolutely true. The fundamentals of SEO are usually pretty straight-forward. Having a vision for your blog may be the most important factor in having a good bounce rate – knowing who your targeted audience are, the type of people you’re blogging for, etc. Once that’s taken care of, the site’s content can be taken into consideration next. This is to keep the visitors interested to stay in the site.