90% website bounce rate - What am I doing wrong?
-
(Also not getting any comments on any of my articles)
Hi, everyone! I'm very new to the community here, but I'm honestly at my wits end.
I've run an affiliate marketing site for about 8 months now, and I've consistently had issues with bounce rate. I've tried to look into it myself, but I can't seem to determine what the issue is.
A couple things, though - One, a lot of my traffic currently goes to two articles which don't actually have any intent to convert. I didn't even write those articles for the sake of conversion, they were just for fun and I thought they'd be useful to people who stumbled across them. So that could be one reason my bounce rate is so high, but I'm not sure.Anyway, I've asked a LOT of people in the past (I was part of an affiliate marketing community at one point - I asked the founders, friends, strangers, and other successful affiliate marketers about this) if there's anything wrong with my content, etc. The answer has always been no, that it's good.
I'm sorry. My thoughts are a bit scatterbrained here. I just don't know what to do here. If all my content for 8 months has just utterly sucked, I'd feel pretty demotivated, but at least I could know what to improve going forward. That's what I need help with from you guys.
Here's my website, though I'm not sure if links are allowed: http://cheapgamesguru.com/
My latest articles aren't really getting any traffic at all yet, so I'm not really concerned with them. Specifically, ignore my Future of the HTC Vive, Crusader Kings 2, and World of Warcraft articles. Those are part of my "fun blogs" where I just write about games and such with no real intent to convert. If they start getting traffic, then I'll go and add some more internal links or CTAs.
However, a couple articles that I AM having issues with are here: http://cheapgamesguru.com/top-5-best-mid-tower-cases ; http://cheapgamesguru.com/top-5-computer-case-fans-the-best-case-fans-for-your-rig ; http://cheapgamesguru.com/what-is-the-best-micro-atx-case-for-gaming-top-5-best-micro-atx-cases (The links on the Micro ATX article are currently broken - This could very well be one of the reasons! However, this trend of high bounce rates started quite some time ago, so it's still an issue)
Could it be as simple as a performance problem? I haven't checked my pagespeed recently, not since I switched to a new (Faster) host. I know users are far more likely to leave if the site doesn't load within 3 seconds.
Another possible reason is referral spam, of course. I've tried my very best to eliminate it as much as possible, used filtering tools, etc. but I can't seem to completely eradicate it.
Thanks in advance! Ask me for any details you might need.
-
I have to agree that the first thing to consider (well, after fixing those broken links) is how your content ties into your conversion funnel. What compels me to stay on your site once I've found the answer I'm looking for? For example, if I'm just looking for recommendations for fans and I land on your post about them, once I've read, why wouldn't I click right back to Google?
Out of curiosity, what constitutes a conversion for you? If a visitor doesn't bounce away, what would you prefer them to do?
-
What exactly is your question?
You experience high bounce rate on the articles aimed at converting visitors to buying affiliate products? And other (non-converting) pages do get way more visitors?
Because those are two different things: number of visitors (people arriving) and high bounce rates (% of people leaving again after visiting).
So…
- is not getting traffic to your converting your problem?
- or are visitors going to the wrong pages?
- or is just plainly not conversing your main problem?
Because when you're able to pull in audience with some pages, then the problem will be mainly content related (in my opinion). That content does resonate. Other content doesn't. Maybe it is due to the nature of your content (e.g. game reviews may be more popular than hardware reviews?) or the way you present your content (your tendency in writing different kinds of articles).
Or perhaps there is more competition for the targeted subject? Or there is far less traffic for the targeted subject.
Do you have an idea of the total volumes for the targeted audiences and what your SERP results are on the targeted keywords?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
GA traffic locations must be wrong? Most hits from a state we don't do business in!
I launched a website earlier this year. Very limited traffic, 200-300 a month. It is an info site for a specialized business. However, when I review my GA traffic reports, 20% of our traffic comes from one city in Virginia. (although the company does business in many states, it does not in Virginia) or anything close. The bounce rate is 97%! Could it be a web scraper or some kind of redirect?
Search Behavior | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Within the Q&A forum, is it spam to include a website in our signature?
Hello Mozzers! I've seen several contributors that end their questions and responses with a website. Just for the sake of the argument, this is an example: -- Some text about the response/question --- Hope I've helped. Gaston Riera www.domain-Gaston-company.com To clarify more, the URL does never have a link. I've always considered that this is a place to share and help other by ours/others expertise not to self promote implicitly our company.
Search Behavior | | Gaston Riera
So, my question is related to the rules and best practices in the forum: Is it spam to include a website in the signature of a message? Does Moz's community staff take some action about those? Thanks!
GR.0 -
Does Not listing the prices on my website hurt?
Hey Mozers, I currently run a catalog type website and there are no prices listed. Would you happen to have an article of some sort that could back up why not listing prices is bad? I'm trying to express the importance of listing prices on the website. Can anyone help, The more articles the better!
Search Behavior | | rpaiva0 -
My satellite website is ranking better than my actual site. Why and what to do?
This is our website: www.sauspiel.de and this is the satellite website. As the satellite site has a better ranking for the keyword "schafkopf" since two or three weeks we wonder how this could happen and what would be best to change it or improve the situation. Shall we take down the satellite site, redirect to the "real" site or try to downgrade? And what would you consider to be the (strongest) reason? Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your help and assessment!
Search Behavior | | sauspiel0 -
What is wrong with my campaign?
I have two campaigns one named BL and another named EBL. The one named EBL is working perfectly, and the way it should, I assume. However, BL is acting very strange, it shows 16,219 pages crawled which BL website has only 1,700 products so it's not possible for the campaign to have 16,219 pages seen by the robot. Here is what happened. We have had several issues with our server. First we received a report of the server that more than 3,000 503 errors have been noticed by Google. So we moved the website to another server, after a while for some reason our website had duplicate products. So instead of the link being /Mens-leather-vest it was /Mens-leather-vest-1020 which is a redirect of the original product. So we removed all products and redid all title tags, meta etc. However, now that when Moz crawls the website it still sees those errors, and duplicates that don't exist anymore. We finished fixing everything last week, and this Monday was a new crawl cycle for moz, and I thought that it will not show the old errors but it is still showing those old errors. Any idea what might be causing it or how I can fix this? Website - www.bikerleather.com Magento 1.7
Search Behavior | | Biker0 -
Visual Website Optimizer vs. Optimizely vs. Conductrics
I've always done my own A/B testing and haven't used a software package. I've heard a lot of good about Visual Website Optimizer. However, I like that Conductrics uses statistical modeling where the others don't. So what do you see as being the really big pluses? Note: I need to find a platform so that we can do testing faster and for more clients at a time... I just don't have the time to hand build and track each client's multivariation test. Thus the need for software. Therefore, ease of use, quick integration, and good analytics are important in my decision making process. Thanks in advance!
Search Behavior | | SteveTheWoodsman2 -
Why does my website not rank better for the keyword i am going for?
My website is www.canadafloraldelivery.com. I just can't seem to get my webpage ranked well for the keyword " Flowers Edmonton " . Also I can't seem to get my Google local listing on the map for many keywords. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Any help would be very appreciated.
Search Behavior | | CKerr0 -
Seller rating in Serps
Hello everyone, I saw something weird today with my own site in Google: http://www.google.nl/webhp?hl=nl&tab=ww#hl=nl&sclient=psy-ab&q=xenon+h4&fp=534989fd828f8f2e&pws=0 The site you see position one is my site (HIDxenonverlichting.nl), you see the seller rating with the stars, but also nearly 2 rules of price information: ''Prijsklasse: Normale prijs: € 79,99 Tijdelijke prijs € 74,99 Inclusief 21% BTW & Gratis verzending!' At this site i don't even have MicroData installed for the reviews or prices, and i've never seen such a long price description in Google. So i was wondering, how could this happen, because i want this much information also at other product pages of course. But then first need to know how this happened? Regards, Yannick
Search Behavior | | iwebdevnl0