Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

Bad Bounce Rate – Web Analytics

January 30, 2010

So, you experience bad bounce rates and you wonder why? don’t these visitors stay around? I have had some internal clients ask me a lot lately about why they have such a high bounce rate. Firstly, understand that when I mean “high” I mean, 70% – pretty bad stuff.

Some assume it might have something to do with our SEO/SEM program. I explain that the purpose of SEO and SEM is to drive traffic to your product pages and we can and do this with great success. What we can’t do is get the visitor to take some sort of action or decide the page is a good fit for them once they arrive there. I liken this to a lead in sales terms. I can get you all the leads you want, but it’s up to the salesperson to actually close the deal. In this case, the page must hold the attention of the visitor within approximately 3-5 seconds of arriving to your page. Not a long time is it? Think about your own search and land behaviors? How many times have you clicked on a search result, only to find yourself annoyed at the lack of content or info you were searching for?

You might be a product champion who needs to drive leads on your product page. You have been looking at the same product page for 18 months or more and wonder what’s wrong with this page? Getting some outside input is always helpful. Have the pseudo visitor (another person who isn’t as involved in the day to day as you are) honestly and critically look at what experience others might be having. What action must you have your visitor take once they arrive on the page? Is there sufficient content and is the navigation easy to follow? Can the visitor even find the action or is it below the fold of the page lost in lots of content and ads? This action should be very simple – request more information, contact a sales rep, send a brochure – something.

I have seen some really awful, confusing, busy pages and really am quite sure that the bounce rate is high because of this very experience. Of course you might also have a high bounce rate based on the search query of the visitor. There might be a visitor who types in “itouch reviews” and selects a page (in natural results of course) that she thinks might give her some information on an itouch – when in fact it’s some mostly blank page with adsense ads strewn about – no real review content to see at all. Can you fault the visitor who returns right back to the search engine to conduct another search query?

This year will be the year that SEO goes another level higher – SEO conversions, at least from my perspective. I really hope to both educate others and learn a lot more in this area of converting and assisting in reducing the large bounce rates I see.

Check your bounce rates lately?

Filed under: SEO Analytics, SEO Factors