Understanding Bounce Rates

Bounce Rate as defined by Google Analytics:

The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.

A high bounce rate simply means that site visitors are finding your content very relevant. A low bounce rate on the other hand indicates that site visitors are engaging with your content, reading, and clicking through to read more. Which is of course exactly the kind of interaction that you want.

Tips To Improve Your Bounce Rate: 

1. Provide highly relevant content. 

So when somebody Google’s “Long Beach Real Estate,” you want to make sure that the content on your page directly matches your visitors search query. Otherwise, you’ll get someone who lands on your page only to immediately click away because your result didn’t match what they were actually searching for.

2. Get rid of the clutter. 

It should be easy to access other areas of your website via a clear navigation path. Eliminate any unnecessary items from your site menu to make it easier to navigate. This also includes eliminating clutter from your sidebar.

Think about what action you want site visitors to take next once they land on your page. If a site widget or navigation item isn’t contribution to one of the action steps you want a site visitor to take next, get rid of it.

3. Reduce external links. 

When you insert an hyperlink into a post or a page, you have the option to open that link in a new window or within the same window. When you link to outside resources within your content, opt to open those links in a new window so that you don’t quickly lose your site visitors.

4. Get rid of any pop-ups. 

Nothing is more intrusive to a first-time site visitor than a pop-up asking them to register to your newsletter. While this may work at capturing email addresses, it’s also potential pushing other qualified site visitors away.

How does your bounce rate measure up? 

Take a look at the analytics for some of your neighborhood pages and your Home Search page, what does your bounce rate look like?