Your Bounce Rate is a good gauge of your SEO & Internet Marketing efforts, but that statement comes with a lot of conditions. Like a lot of elements in Internet Marketing, and especially Analytics, you have to realize that interpretation is needed. It’s not necessarily something you can look at and decide it’s good or bad. Here’s a quick story to make things clearer.

A client called me and asked me about the current bounce rate. When I told him what it was, he replied that he was concerned because it should be another number. He was told so by somebody. I had to explain some things quickly to calm him down:

There’s no Right Bounce Rate that fits all industries and types of sites. It’s a fact that customers ‘bounce’ at different percentages in different markets. Now if you have an 80% or above Bounce Rate, you should be worried. But there’s no standard rate.

HOW BOUNCE RATES CAN BE VERY DECEIVING

Bounce Rate should be looked at more according to individual pages, not necessarily across an entire site. For example, the above client’s site had a lot of articles I’d written that ranked very well nationally on his subject.

So, a lot of those visitors who came in through the articles were from all over the country. They stayed to read the articles because they were helpful and informative. However, this client’s office only served a certain geographical area, and most readers weren’t from there and couldn’t use his services. Because of that they didn’t stick around after reading the articles. Thus, the Bounce Rate was inflated by those articles that ranked so well nationally.

THE TRUE MEASURING STICK OF BOUNCE RATE SUCCESS

The real measurement of your success with Bounce Rate is improving it. As we noted above, it's often difficult to say definitively that your rate is a good one or bad one. Unless it is abnormally high, of course. So you need to work on things like these:

• Is your headline strong and to the point?

• Are you giving the visitor real content or do they arrive and find nothing on the page that truly grabs them and their interest?

• Are you giving your visitors a reason to go deeper into the site?

• Are you showing them clearly how to get to the information they want?

• Is your Navigation easy to understand and easy to locate?

These are just a few things to look at critically on those pages that have high bounce rates. Go over them through the eyes of a visitor who has never been to the site before. You might even want to have a friend or family member look over the site to give you their impressions and a critique.

Remember, your point of view is not the one that’s most important here. It’s the POV of your customer, your visitor, the searcher. You have to give them what they want or else you end up with a very lonely site and a very quiet business.