Is your site sticky? Website bounce rate explained
Why sticky, is that good or bad? Stickiness is a term to define how interesting your visitors are in your website.
A benchmark of stickiness is the bounce rate. A bounce can be defined as how many visitors only look at one page on your website. Therefore it is a measurement of visitor interest and visit quality. Bounce rate assessment should always be an important part of your overall Search Engine Optimisation strategy.
Sometimes all the marketing effort is spent attracting visitors to a website with a "more the better" approach. This, rather generic method is often the culprit, amongst a few others, for a high bounce rate.
A well developed strategy looks at all aspects of the website, and it is important to look at how responsive and empathic a website is to your intended audience. First of all they must find you and secondly when they do, they must be stimulated and engaged by the tone, structure and content quality; visitors are more likely to look further through a website if these factors are catered for.
How does this affect me and why should I concentrate on my bounces?
It is important that bounce rate is assessed both "sitewide" and for individual pages. This data is particularly useful for detecting pages that are underperforming or simply not stimulating the visitor. It's a great way of assessing marketing drive, a page update or page copy. With A/B and multivariate testing options now available in most good analytical packages it is bounce reduction is now more traceable and quantifiable than ever.
Deep linking is not only an essential practise in natural search engine optimisation, but can be very powerful in terms of lowering your bounce rate and improving conversion. Why push people to a homepage that may be very generic in nature. It’s pointless, especially when there is a perfectly good, well targeted subject page ready for interested searchers and potential customers to land safely on and continue their route through your site. If you haven’t got a responsive landing page, then consider making one or invest in having one created for you, the initial outlay will enhance the conversion rate and rewards will be reaped.
If you are sending your visitors directly to a specific landing page and the bounce rate is still high then it's time to study make up of the page itself. Is the content interesting enough to engage people? Is the tone of the copy in line with the visitor demographic? Does the subject of the page reinforce the keywords that your visitor typed in to find you? Is the layout of the page sympathetic to the visitor? These are all questions that need to be answered and acted upon because a website that enjoys low bounces is one that has a strong strategy and is aimed at harvesting only the relevant traffic.
We help build online strategies, and have complete capability to alter pages, copy, graphics and layouts to reinforce them. We do it all and have spent many a candlelit hour reading, practising and honing our science so basically you don’t have to.
Go on, take a look, is your website too bouncy?