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 good 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 rates are a part of your overall Search Engine Optimisation strategy.
Sometimes all the marketing effort is spent attracting visitors to a website, the more the better surely if we get thousands of visitors we will get lots of traffic. The bounce rate is therefore overlooked.
A well developed strategy looks at all aspects of the website, and it is important to look at the quality of the website to make sure that when you get visitors to your website they have arrived, firstly because they have found you and are interested and secondly when they do arrive they are engaged by what you say and are encouraged to get in touch.
The bounce rate is readily available in Google analytics for your website and also for individual pages. The question is how does this affect me and why should I concentrate on my bounces.
Each page has a bounce rate, and this is useful to see which pages are not performing and also provides an insight in to how effective a marketing campaign is.
Deep linking is a natural strategy for increasing the stickiness a marketing campaign as you take visitors straight to a page of interest to them rather than to the homepage and letting them decide where to go. The bounce rate can in this case show how many people are responding positively and clicking through to contact you.
So, you have sent your visitors directly to page and the bounce rate is still high. We need to look at the message on the page. Is the content interesting enough to engage with people, is it saying the right thing, does it reinforce the keywords that your visitor typed in to find you? This could highlight weakness in your initial keyword research and campaigns such as poorly placed adverts in your Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy.
A good strategy will be aimed at directing the right traffic to your website, those who are already interested. When you have an interested visitor then you have to engage with them by showing you are an expert in your area and are thinking about your visitors needs. Of course, a good website will also offer contact methods to direct visitors to get in touch, and other relevant pages on your website.
Pure emerald help build your online strategies, we have spent many a candlelit hour reading, practising and honing our science so basically you don’t have to.
