What Does Your Bounce Rate Mean?

The bounce rate is a strange measurement. It doesn’t have precisely the same meaning everywhere.

1. Many people define a bounce rate as the proportion of site visitors who leave a landing page instantly without carrying out any other actions on-site.

2. Other people define the bounce rate as the portion of site visitors who have been to one web page on a website and haven’t done other things there.

It all depends on the website and additional circumstances what a bounce rate indicates and what a high bounce rate is. For example the e-commerce websites I have optimized for experiences bounce rates close to 20% – 25%. Why? The traffic they obtained was extremely highly targeted. In other words, the people got precisely what they desired.

On the other hand, the blogs I own as well as write for have higher bounce rates of 40 to 60%. Why? People reading through blogs tend to be casual readers, this is especially true when your visitors are coming from social media sites. They check out a post instantly and determine whether they would like to read it or not.

Therefore depending on the context of your website, your bounce rate of 50% could be terrible, alright or even excellent. Your bounce rate can give you essential insights into your site visitors expectations. A reduced bounce rate can enhance the conversion rate as well as the return on investment. So, as an SEO I have to deal with bounce rates often. What good is it to obtain enormous amounts of site visitors when 90% of them simply just create load on the hosting server without actually looking at your website?

The correct question is “what does my bounce rate truly mean?”

Being familiar with the meaning of your bounce rate is the key element on improving it. It will help to find out whether or not you truly need to make improvements to it. As an alternative you could actually block various traffic sources or even get rid of a web page that produces unneeded load.

1) To start with figure out your web page or website type as well as its objective:

* Is your website a one-page-wonder like a microsite?
* Is you website an e-commerce website where you sell things on the exact same domain?
* Is your website a news site where persons look for information from it?

2) After that determine what type of queries lead to your website. Search engines like Google are used mainly for the 3 types of queries:

* navigational types (people that type craigslist and ebay, facebook or myspace etc. in the internet browser address bar or search engine)
* informative types (people that look for specific data on a given topic.
* commercial types (people seeking to purchase a product or service)

Navigational queries often have the lowest bounce rate when visitors find what they are looking for.

Whenever you browse for Facebook you would like to find yourself on it whenever you type it. Facebook most likely has a really reduced bounce rate from these types of queries. One of my own blogs has a high ranking for the keyword Facebook and I get plenty of individuals who seem to search for Facebook on it. The majority of of them bounce needless to say.

Commercial queries maintain a low bounce rate if consumers locate the service or product they are after.Just in case it’s not 20% you might want to check out whether or not the items you are promoting are the types consumers would like to pay for.

Informational queries direct the most fickle people to your website. They usually don’t know if they truly are searching for what you are writing about.

3) Thirdly, think about the actual ways you want consumers to behave on your website, do you need them to visit long and go through a lot of pages or perhaps do you favor a fast conversion?

A website that makes money through ad impressions would like you to remain on the site for as long as possible and to click frequently. This is the reason why image galleries on these types of websites have a tendency to display only a single image per page. They would like you to see 10 advertisements rather than one.

Now that you have a much better understanding of exactly what your bounce rate means, you can easily begin bettering your bounce rate or you could concentrate on some other parts of advanced on-site SEO.

So don’t neglect to ask yourself: Exactly what does my own bounce rate truly mean prior to attempting to make improvements to it.