Lower Your Blogs Bounce Rate With Related Posts

As we know, without traffic a web site is virtually useless so we take huge steps to increase our visitor counts. But a lot of us don't take into consideration how active these visitors are on site, after all, there is no point having lots of hits if know ones reading your stuff, right?

When looking at how visitors interact with your site the bounce rate becomes a very useful bit of info, and by knowing the facts you can work towards improving your stats. CTR a little low? You might want to check your bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate, put simply, is the percentage of bounced visits to your site.They jump in, they bounce out.
This is how Google describes bounced visits ...

• A user clicks on a link deep into your site sent by a friend, reads the information on the page, and closes the browser.
• A user comes to your home page, looks around for a minute or two, and immediately leaves.
• A user comes directly to a reference page on your site from a web search, leaves the page available in the browser while completing other tasks in other browser windows and the session times out.

A high bounce rate means people visit your page and leave almost straight away, a low bounce rate shows that your visitors are actually reading, participating and clicking around your site.
So you can see why it could be important to know this stat.

Improve Bounce Rate with related posts

To improve bounce rate we need to give users a reason to continue digging around our site and one of the easiest ways to do this is to place a related posts/content widget below your posts.

Related posts/content widgets usually display the title and sometimes a short summary of maybe 4 or 5 posts. Using thumbnails is great way of catching peoples attention. Check out the example image below...

By offering further information related to the content of the page or even something that looks interesting to read, you are not only supplying readers with a wealth of information you are keeping them engaged and more importantly on site.

Top related post widgets.

If you are interested in improving your bounce rate with related posts, here are a few third party related posts widgets you might want to check out...

LinkWithin

Link within is the related post widget I use here on VirtuaCash (may change soon). It is very simple to install on most popular platforms and you don't even have to sign up to use it.

NRelate

NRelate is very similar to linkwithin. You don't need to sign up to use it, although signing up gives you more advanced options. NRelate also allows you to make some money from your links.

Outbrain

Out brain is a popular widget that's great for customising using css. It also offers you the chance to make some money from your links, like NRelate.