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If you’re thrilled with the results of your SEO campaign merely because it gets your website thousands of unique hits a day, you may want to check yourself. Or even better, check your site’s bounce rates with Google Analytics (GA). Getting visitors to your website is only half the battle; in fact, the battle hasn’t even really started if people are treating your site like a revolving door. What good is SEO if it entices people to your site—even if it’s millions of people—only to have them leave five seconds later to find what they were really looking for? According to Google, bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” The higher your site’s bounce rate, the worse you should feel about its performance. After all, you want people to come to your site, take off their coats, and stay awhile. And if they buy what you’re selling, click on your ads, and enjoy themselves in general while they’re there, all the better for you. Thorough scrutiny of your site’s bounce rates is helpful for two major reasons. First, you can find out which referral sites have the highest bounce rate, which will allow you to investigate your marketing within those sites and make necessary changes. Second, you can use Google Analytics to view your site’s top ten landing pages and the bounce rates for each individual page. Then you can take a good look at those pages and fix whatever it is that’s driving your visitors away in such a hurry. You might also consider using Google Analytics to analyse your site’s SEO campaign, which analysis goes hand-in-hand with lowering bounce rates. Find out which keywords are yielding the highest bounce rates, and stop using them; obviously, the visitors searching with those keywords aren’t looking for whatever it is you’re offering. Using web analytics to evaluate your site should be a given, but often even the most savvy online marketing experts fail to properly utilise bounce rate statistics, which is a mistake. If you want to stop your visitors from taking one look at your site and bouncing, find out what’s driving them away and fix it now. To view the bounce rates for your website with Google Analytics, go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate. |
