The last few days I’ve done some reading on bounce rates and spent some time in Google Analytics getting a feel for what’s what, and it seems that the best rule for bounce rates is that you’re doing well if your bounce rate is lower than it was last month.
Some articles will give you some fixed guidelines. For example, How to Fix a Leaky Web Site says under 25% is good, but over 40% is too high.
I don’t buy that because your bounce rate will depend on a whole lot of things that will vary from site to site. A blog has a completely different site architecture than a store that sells dishwasher parts, and different sites get different sorts of traffic.
Here are a few things to look at to get a sense of what’s going on with your site.
Look at your traffic sources and compare the bounce rates for each. (E.g., direct traffic, referring sites, and paid search vs. natural search.) Look at your top landing and top exit pages.
Do you see any patterns? Look at the pages with a low bounce rate and see how they differ from the pages with a high bounce rate. Do they attract different sorts of visitors? Is there a clear call to action, or some obvious next step on one page and not on the other?
Remember that a high bounce rate may simply be a sign of poorly qualified traffic. Your site may rank highly for a word that has several different meanings. (E.g., “cobra” can be a snake or a kind of mustang.)
I’ve set up some “advanced segments” in Google Analytics that let me track how many people stay for one page view, or two, or three or more. I then run a report on my top search terms and see what percentage of my traffic falls into those three groups. Good pages not only have a low bounce rate, but they have a high “time on site” and a high percentage of people in the “3 or more” category.
One little trick I’ve discovered that lowers my wordpress blogs bounce rate is a clever little backlinking strategy
If you have a series of posts under a specific category when backlinking, concentrate your linking to the category rather than individual posts.
For example if you have an SEO blog and one of your categories is ‘back linking techniques’ and you have 10 posts under that category. When targeting the keyword ‘back linking techniques’ link to the category rather than the individual posts. It allows you to concentrate linking to one url rather than having a smaller number of links to a group of posts (i.e. better 500 back links to one category than 100 each to five posts).
I’ve used this technique successfully for several categories to rank on page 1 of google search results for higher competition keywords. I have several category pages that actually have google PR as a result (not that PR is a big deal… it’s more of a vanity thing LOL)
The advantage with this strategy is that when people land on the category page they see several related posts rather than just one. This reduces bounce rate by making them curious. They’ll click through to one post then go back to the category and click through to another. Sometimes in my stats I’ll see them click through to four or five posts in the one category.
Julia
Good idea. Thanks for the input, Julia.