89% bounce rate on edgy.app

How much hits you are getting. Make sure the IPs visiting your news website are legit users not bots . You can whois the IP addresses to find if the visitor are coming for legit internet provider.

It's normal bounce rate of a blog site, this is not a porn tube. Nobody likes read too much. People from organic search read only 1 post, they are not interested in other info. And it's not viral news, but micro-niche content.
What bounce rate did you expect? For bounce rate like 30% you need very high engagement and pages/session should be on level 6-7, you have 1.21.
So, the main problem is type of content and quality, not website structure. You can lower bounce rate, but not much.
Many websites just sends an event to GA after 15 seconds session and have bounce rate 25-30% with 1 pages/session, old trick.

shu1er said:

It's normal bounce rate of a blog site, this is not a porn tube. Nobody likes read too much. People from organic search read only 1 post, they are not interested in other info. And it's not viral news, but micro-niche content.
What bounce rate did you expect? For bounce rate like 30% you need very high engagement and pages/session should be on level 6-7, you have 1.21.
So, the main problem is type of content and quality, not website structure. You can lower bounce rate, but not much.
Many websites just sends an event to GA after 15 seconds session and have bounce rate 25-30% with 1 pages/session, old trick.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your insight!

@shu1er I'm familiar with that old trick, but it does it help SEO at all, or is it just a feel-good bandaid? Users don't actually have a better experience as a result.

The question was asked in the thread, what it is that I'm hoping to achieve. The goal would be of course that people spend more time on site, either being fully satisfied with the page and leaving a comment or like, or browse until they find something they want to comment on and like. Then I would hope they come back for more because they liked what they read. I will focus on my attention on that goal more. So far, the new site launch was an exercise in minimalism and speed.

Do you have text links inside the articles linking to other relevant articles?

BassTrackerBoats said:

Do you have text links inside the articles linking to other relevant articles?

Click to expand...

We try to have at least one per article. Most our in-article links are to high-authority sources which are useful links to our audience (we have no paid links or promoted links on the site), those open in a new tab.

dukefx said:

We try to have at least one per article. Most our in-article links are to high-authority sources which are useful links to our audience (we have no paid links or promoted links on the site), those open in a new tab.

Click to expand...

Get rid of those links to high authority sites and interlink a bit more. I almost never use those high authority links to outside sources as they take a reader from my site.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Get rid of those links to high authority sites and interlink a bit more. I almost never use those high authority links to outside sources as they take a reader from my site.

Click to expand...

@BassTrackerBoats I'll direct my content team to use external links more carefully, and increase # of internal links per article. Thank you for the suggestion.