Understanding the Bounce Rate Metric

By | April 5, 2016

Everything a Website Owner Should Know About the Bounce Rate of Their Website

The main goal of every business website is to convert potential customers to customers. There are quite a few techniques a person can use to entice new potential customers and to work on their website’s landing pages to help convert them to customers. One of the ways to tell if these techniques are working is to look at the bounce rate of the website. This is essential for every website owner to understand as it affects the effectiveness of the website in creating new customers for the business.

What Are Bounces and Why Does the Rate Matter?

Bouncing is when a person visits a website through a link, then leaves without looking around the website further. They might just read the article on the landing page and then decide the website doesn’t offer what they need or they might decide the website isn’t visually appealing. In some cases, they might actually not make it to the page as it takes too long for some of the components to load. This matters as a person is more likely to become a customer if they try different links on the website a look around at exactly what is offered on the website before they leave.

What’s an Acceptable Range for This Rate?

This rate is determined by dividing the number of people who view one page by the number who click links to see more of the website. It’s usually represented as a percentage. Under 20% is going to be fantastic and difficult to achieve. Around 35% is going to be an acceptable rate, with anything between 20% and 49% being good. However, if the rate is above 50%, it’s a good idea to learn more about these rates and what can affect them so the percentage can be lowered.

How Can a Person Learn the Rage for Their Website?

The easiest way for a website owner to check this rate is through Google Analytics. The information is shown as a percentage for each page on the website. Once they know the rate for their website, they can compare their landing page to the site average easily using the drop down menu to see which pages have a higher rate. This can then be used to look into why certain pages have a higher rate of bouncing and what can be done to reduce them.

Does the Rate Effect the SEO of their Website?

When a person is looking into lowering the rate of bounces for their website, they will want to consider the search engine optimization of their website as well. A website that is properly optimized is going to offer higher quality content that is more likely to grab a person’s attention when they’re on the website and help to keep them on the website. When the website owner works with a Dallas SEO expert, they’ll likely see the rate for their website lower as the website is properly optimized. Website optimization and the rate of bounces are going to work together to make a better website that’s going to be easy for potential customers to find and be more likely to convert potential customers to customers.

Why Do Quality Websites Have a Lower Rate?

High-quality websites are going to have a much lower rate of bounces. This is because they have engaging content, they are easy to navigate even on mobile devices, and they are targeting the right keywords. Their landing pages aren’t just a way to provide the potential customer with more information, but they also include information that can be read quickly with a call to action at the end to encourage the person reading the content to do something. Often, this is signing up for an email list, making a purchase, or something else that helps convert them to a customer of the website.

How Can a Website Owner Reduce This Rate?

A website owner can do quite a bit to lower the rate of bounces on their website. It’s important to have a well-designed website that loads quickly, is easy to navigate, and properly formatted. There should be various marketing techniques employed like Video Marketing, but they will want to be careful to ensure it doesn’t negatively effect their page either. Pages with a video that takes too long to load or that play automatically, for example, can negatively affect the visitor’s impression. They should also make sure the content matches what the customer might be looking for and be sure the call to action is prominently displayed on the landing page so it’s easy to find.

The ranking of a website is only one way for a website owner to tell how well their website is doing. The rate in which people bounce back to another website after only visiting the landing page can be very telling in how effective the landing page is and how high the conversion rates for the website actually are. Take the time to look into the rates on your website today to see what can be improved to help you gain more customers for your website. It may be as easy as working with an SEO expert to make sure your website is properly optimized and easily impresses visitors or it can be a matter of choosing more appropriate and well-designed content for your website. Once the rate of bounces is lowered, the website owner will start to see an increase in the number of conversions for their website.

Category: SEO