Continued from Monday…
If you’ve been worrying that your 70%+ bounce rate needed immediate remediation, you need to take a deep breath and dig further.
If your website has in-depth informational content and a blog to build authority for search engines, with the increase in mobile searches, your bounce rate may be higher than a site without this type of content. Equally your website traffic will typically be higher.
So how high is too high for a bounce rate. When the numbers get to 78% to 80%, I would start to really be concerned. But there is more to this equation than just a bounce rate percentage.
Make sure to evaluate your time on page and time on site as part of an overall review. It may be as simple as moving out of the Google Display network with your advertising or adding exclusions to your program to drop your bounce rate fast. You may be driving low cost and low quality traffic to your own site erroneously thus negatively impacting your own bounce rate.
Before you start to tease apart your content take a careful look at your website and the potential causes for a high bounce rate.
- Is your user experience good?
- Do your pages load quickly?
- Do you have an esthetically pleasing website design that is easy to navigate?
- Do you have content that matches what you are selling or to build your authority?
- Have you reviewed your AdWords traffic? Is it targeted?
- Are your ads showing heavily in the content or display network thus driving up impressions?
- Is your content thin or scraped from other sites. Uniqueness is important here.
- Are you providing thoughtful content that builds a case for the use of your services or just filler?
Bounce rate is definitely a strong indicator of a user’s vote for your website, but a higher than typical number may not necessarily mean that you have a site that needs repair.
However a high bounce rate definitely needs a careful review to assure that you do not have a problem that needs to be addressed.