28th July, 2011
If you are serious about marketing and developing your online business, then getting thousands of unique and repeat visitors each month is just half the battle! A good SEO or web marketing campaign will tackle a variety of site issues, possibly identifying things you did not initially consider, such as page / domain authority or bounce rate!
So, what is a bounce rate and why should you care about it?
Well… A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that left your site from the entrance (landing) page. A website bounce rate is a metric to measure page and visitor quality, the higher a high bounce rate the more people are leaving your site, thus not finding what they are looking for.
The challenge here is to make your landing page as interesting and relevant as possible, making more visitors stay on your site, lowering the bounce rate. Pages within your website should deliver information, services and products that were promised in the ad copy or search result, AKA your title text and meta description… So don’t title it ‘Second hand computer for sale in Portsmouth’ if a page contains info on ‘new printers for sale in Chichester!
People who land on your site may bounce away by clicking on a link to another website, hitting the back button or closing the browser… For whatever reason people do decide to leave, it is not a good one! The task here is to keep people interested, convert traffic into business and keep people browsing your website for as long as they need to!
I did some research on the web and came across the figure of 40% as a decent bounce rate… Some of the sites we work on have seen much lower, around 20%!
I guess the average bounce rate will depend heavily on the type of site / business you are in… Adding quality content, read more links and providing value to visitors should keep people interested (regardless of the sector)! In other words, having a single page website is not going to give you a low bounce rate, in fact the opposite! However, a single page site may work for you and your business… In that case, the bounce rate is not a worthwhile metric to monitor.
Understanding how visitors use and react with your website is valuable information to have, especially if you run a business! Knowing your bounce rate will allow you to address certain pages within a site, the kind people don’t get on with and the pages people like to visit!
Please feel free to post your thoughts and opinions below, we would love to hear from businesses trying to lower a bounce rate, or better understand the principles of SEO and web marketing… Whatever you decide to do next in terms of developing your site and online business, good luck!