Yesterday I met our SEO Advisor Gareth Edwards of Arrowsmith Marketing and The National B2B Centre to ask him about bounce rates on our website, which had been bothering me recently.
We use Google Analytics for SEO, that is, to optimise our website performance for internet search engines. The Bounce Rate tells you what percentage of people finding your website, immediately click away from the page they land on. This generally happens because finding your site was either a mistake or the page content is poor or confusing. I was concerned about the latter.
So, what is an acceptable bounce rate? I've heard 50% is common and a few of our key pages were around this figure and one was at 60%. Having made improvements to these pages recently, I was getting that feeling of "diminishing returns" and wasn't sure where to go next.
Gareth offered a few good suggestions to improve keyword performance, image positioning and adding our credentials to all key landing pages, which will help to improve the immediate page impact. But, what surprised me was working out the benefit of shaving a few percentage points off the bounce rate compared with generating more traffic. If you accept that some pages will have higher bounce rates than others, then focusing your efforts on driving traffic numbers makes more sense.
So, perhaps this is one less thing to get hung up about. Personally, I shall not be wasting my time tweaking web pages and turning my efforts towards generating inbound links from now on.
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