Good content but high bounce rate

[petersommertravels]

Hi all,

We run a website offering specialist turkey tours and gulet cruises. Our website holds a few information and recipes pages which are doing well in the engines and bring in alot of traffic. However these pages are crippling our bounce rate with bounces of about 80-90%.

The time on site for these pages are above the websites average, but it seems that once the reader has finished with the information/ recipe, they bounce back to the Search engines.

An example of one of our recipe pages can be found here: http://www.petersommer.com/turkey/turkish-food/pilav-rice/

We have thought about moving and redirecting these pages from our main site to a new website, but we are worried that it may effect our position in the SERP's.

Can anybody offer any advice on this?

Thanks

[firstconversion]

Well, the recipes are pretty standard fodder, cant imagine them attracting much. Just seems like a weird diversion of effort to me.

[EGOL]

Maybe the recipes and the quizzes will attract lilnks?  Lots of sales sites are powered by links to freebie content.

[firstconversion]

Why do you care about bounce rate?

You are trying to sell cruises to people who are looking for recipes, of course your bounce rate will be high. Adding quizzes or whatever isnt going to help you sell cruises.

Stop worrying about bounce rates on recipe pages and get selling cruises to people who want to go on a cruise

[petersommertravels]

Thanks all for the great responses.

One further question...if these methods still can't get the bounce rate down. Would it be a good idea to remove the content (to a new site and redirect) or should we just live with the high bounce?

[RyanKent]

I agree with EGOL's suggestion. After looking at your site I would recommend using a lot more anchor links. Your use of anchor text is confined entirely to the last paragraph which seems to be tacked on as an afterthought. Take a look at a wikipedia article on a similar topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdeli_pilav.

The links offer readers an easy opportunity to drill down and find relevant information as they are naturally reading an article. Many readers have developed a form of tunnel vision that allows them to filter out sidebars but they still see the anchor links. A couple small images such as found in the wiki article would be helpful as well. The images can contain links to an image gallery on your site.

[MarieHaynes]

I have some pages on my site that regularly get read and then the reader immediately bounces back to the search engine.  What I did is put a few links at the bottom of the content to some cool tools that I have on my site.  It says something like, "Check out our ____ calculator!"

Some other examples of content that might drive them in further:

-Quizzes (people love doing quizzes)

-Awesome photos

I did check out your page and the links that you have at the bottom are not enticing enough.  Make it really obvious that they could get some more good and relevant information on another page of your site.

I do have an additional thought though - it may be hard to decrease the bounce rate on a recipe page.  I mean, if I'm looking for a recipe I'm not really browsing for information like I do for other searches.  Once I've found the recipe I'm likely not going to want to do a quiz.  But...what I might want is to see photos of this recipe...that may help!

[EGOL]

Offer the visitor something else to read.

Make highly related content and offer links to it with colorful thumbnail images and inviting text descriptions.  Place these links in obvious locations within the content and beside the content.

Go to top newspaper sites like NYT and LAT and note how they have links to "what's hot" "Recommended" "most viewed".