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You are here: Home / Article Writing Tips / What I Learned About Writing & Sharing Content In 2012 (Part 2)

What I Learned About Writing & Sharing Content In 2012 (Part 2)

December 27, 2012 By Lisa Angelettie 6 Comments

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Let Me Continue To Share What I Learned About Writing And Sharing Content This Year: Off Topic Content, Bounce Rates, Laser Focused Content

I learned a very BIG lesson in 2012 in regards to my beloved Google. Sometimes they make changes that we don’t like at first but are for our own good. For a very long time, I was getting great traffic to a few of my sites, especially this one, but my bounce rate was at an abysmal 80%. (I cringe just typing that number!) I knew that this was going to be a big problem for me in the future because Google had made it very clear that at some point in the future they were going to penalize sites with poor bounce rates.

bounce rates image

FIRST – I have known for a very long time what the problem was with my bounce rate, I just didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t that I was writing content that was off topic for my readers, although it sort of was. Throughout the years of writing articles on this blog, I have always giggled at how bad of a speller I am. I thought that if I was making some of those errors that other people were too, so I came up with this bright idea to share some of those grammer blunders with my readers.

These were actually articles that I did zero keyword research on, I just wrote them up. What I didn’t count on was just how many people look up these terms everyday. There were a lot! For example, one of the terms that I get a lot of traffic from is bare vs. bear. A lot of people do not know how to use these two terms properly, so a lot of people found my article on it, but this created a big problem for me…

SECOND – Sites that were dedicated to grammar  only were referring to my article on their websites. While I was honored that they used me as a resource, I also thought that perhaps I would get a lot of writers from these sites (because I work with a lot of writers) but that was not the case. I basically got a lot of lookie-loos. Could have been kids needing help with a paper or whoever, but they were people who read the definitions and then clicked off my site within a second or two. They got what they needed very quickly and left. This is NOT what I want people to do on my website, and this is not what you want either.

THIRD – While my site is dedicated to helping people create better content and good grammar is part of that, people are not generally going to use my site as a referral for grammar tips. Therefore the high bounce rate. So what happened to fix it? Nothing on my part. What happened was that when Google added their “exact domain match” update, it knocked a lot of my grammar tip pages way down the search results, so I no longer get the huge surge of traffic I use to from these pages. In fact, my traffic decreased by about 10% from this one change which made me very upset – at first.

BUT the result was that NOW my traffic visits my site through articles that are laser focused and related to my website’s mission. People visit for up 15 to 30 minutes now – some longer. I get a lot more page views per visitor. So now my bounce rate is at an all time low of 13%! Can you say yippee!!!

LESSONS LEARNED – The lessons learned are simple. While in the past I have casted a pretty wide net in regards to content I will create for my site, I will no longer do that. While I know a lot about a lot of topics having run my business for many years online, the reality is that I cannot write about everything. Content for my site will be laser focused around my topic. I will include (sort of) off topic articles in my newsletters, in guest posts, or with my private clients. I don’t want to ever throw the balance off of my site again.

Also, your bounce rate matters if you want organic traffic from the search engines. So get familiar with yours by checking your Google Analytics stats and make any adjustments you need to make in regards to the “focus” of your content.

Read Part One Of What I Learned About Writing & Sharing Content in 2012

 

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Filed Under: Article Writing Tips, Content Marketing, New Writers Tagged With: bounce rate, Content Marketing

Comments

  1. Kent Chen says

    January 1, 2013 at 6:00 pm

    Thanks for sharing your experiences, there is always something to learn on your blog.

    Reply
  2. Brett Riley says

    January 6, 2013 at 3:08 am

    Informative as always Lisa. You are one of the people I most trust and prefer to follow

    Reply
    • Lisa Angelettie says

      January 22, 2013 at 12:20 am

      Thanks so much Brett:)

      Reply
  3. Shiv@android says

    January 23, 2013 at 7:22 am

    Thanks for great post your experience will really gonaa help. I am impressed your way of writing and putting content Thanks!

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Measure The Quality Of Your Blog Traffic In Under Five Minutes says:
    February 4, 2013 at 11:12 pm

    […] I had a lot of trouble with for a good while because when I first started this particular site, my content was not tightly focused enough. If you have a high bounce rate it means that people are visiting your site, not really seeing what […]

    Reply
  2. Content Marketing News Round-Up - Reputation Capital says:
    May 27, 2015 at 3:35 pm

    […] Lisa Angelettie tells what she learned about writing and sharing content during 2012 in this two part series. (Part I / Part II) […]

    Reply

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