When speaking with potential and existing clients, bounce rates often crop up in conversation. A pretty standard comment is “What is an acceptable bounce rate?”. When business owners see a bounce rate at 35-40%, shock often kicks in when they start imaging how many sales they might be losing.
Every industry is different. The problem with retail is that people do shop around or click randomly when in a rush. Often websites are full of text that can draw in people who are not on a trail to purchase anything. Numerous factors come into play with bounce rates, and ensuring great quality and keyword rich text is crucial. Note that when I say keyword rich I mean varied and topical, not stuffed and spammy.
Once again this a genuine question about visitor behaviour and traffic analysis comes back round to best practice methodology. I see so many cases of companies simply not wanting to offer the right messages to both Google and the visiting traffic. Through commanding, supreme and informative content this can be achieved, helping reduce bounce rates significantly.
Some optimisers harp on about link building to a degree that detracts from the other 50% of SEO- on-page elements including product and service descriptions. Google frequently emphasises the importance of painting an authoritative picture to the search engines, actualised by engineering a thoughtfully conceived content program.
Over time this enables the website credibility to grow in stature. Domination in a market sector can only be realised by including this work effort as part of the industry related SEO campaign.
The major plus side to this approach is while you are offering the search engines exactly what they want, you are also providing the better experience and information that the consumer craves.
Content that I create for iM3 is borne from a healthy mix of experiences, factual references and market demands (for online marketing related services). The keywords and phrases are considered at the point of writing, not over analysed in any way. We want our content to be natural (subsequently being unique to the search robots) and serve a purpose.
iM3 bounce rates yesterday, note the website average is below 1% which we find sustainable:
Avg. Time on Site00:01:30 Site Avg: 00:01:29 (1.32%) |
% New Visits82.43% Site Avg: 86.73% (-4.95%) |
Bounce Rate1.35% Site Avg: 0.88% (52.70%) |
