Your Bounce Rate – How To Understand It & Use It To Solve Your Marketing Problems
Your website’s Bounce Rate is a good gauge of your SEO & marketing efforts, but that statement comes with a lot of conditions.
Like a lot of elements in Internet Marketing, and especially Analytics, you have to realize that interpretation is needed.
It’s not necessarily something you can look at and decide immediately what it means. Here’s a quick story to make things clearer.
How Bounce Rates Can Be Deceiving
A client called me and asked me about the current bounce rate. When I told him what it was and he replied that he was very concerned. He said it should be another number.
He was told so by somebody. I had to explain some things quickly to calm him down. They’ll help you too in understanding Bounce Rates and its uses for your Internet Marketing:
- There’s no one ‘Right’ Bounce Rate that fits all industries and all types of sites. It’s a fact that customers ‘bounce’ at different rates in different markets. Now if you have an 80% or above Bounce Rate, you should be worried. But there’s no standard rate.
- Bounce Rate should be looked at more according to individual pages, not necessarily across an entire site. For example, the above client’s site had a lot of articles I’d written that ranked very well nationally on his subject.So, visitors who came in through the articles were from all over the country. They stayed to read the articles because they were helpful and informative.However, this client’s office only served a certain geographical area and most readers weren’t from there and couldn’t use his services.
Because of that they didn’t stick around after reading the articles. Thus, the Bounce Rate was inflated by those articles that ranked so well nationally.
The True Measuring Stick For Bounce Rate Success
The real measurement of your success with Bounce Rate is improving it. As we noted above, it’s often difficult to say definitively that your rate is a good one or bad one. Unless it is abnormally high, of course.
So you need to work on things like these
- Is your headline strong and to the point?
- Are you giving the visitor real content or do they arrive and find nothing on the page that truly grabs them and their interest?
- Are you giving your visitors a reason to go deeper into the site? Are you showing them clearly how to get to the information they want?
- Is your Navigation easy to understand and easy to locate?
These are just a few things to look at critically on those pages that have high bounce rates. Go over them through the eyes of a visitor who’s never been to the site before.
You might even want to have a friend or family member look over the site to give you their impressions and a critique.
Remember, your point of view is not the one that’s most important. It’s the POV of your customer, your visitor, the searcher that should consume your time and attention.
You have to give them what they want or else you end up with a very lonely site and a very quiet business.
Contact us today for consultation on your SEO and Internet Marketing needs and find out how we can make improvements almost immediately.
Article written by Jonathan Cook
