Should You Worry About Your Bounce Rate?

Should You Worry About Your Bounce Rate?
A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website – 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal. But does it really matter that much? The answer is “yes” and “no” depending on your goals and your site.

What does bounce rate mean?
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page” – from Google’s Analytics help pages.

When does bounce rate matter?

– If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site

– If exploration of your site is important to you

– If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers

– If yours is a retail site and want people to shop around and make purchases

– If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content

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Get Focused With Your Website Marketing – A Reader Example

Sometimes I give some freebie advice to my subscribers and readers by way of a blog post. I received an email from Becky at Classy Sassy Couture who is looking for more ways to market her website and improve her SEO. Classy Sassy Couture sells  custom-beaded clothes and accessories via ClassySassyCouture.com. She also blogs at http://classysassycouture.typepad.com

Here’s a few of the questions/comments she had:

She tells me that she’s not sure what to blog about but that she picks up new followers whenever she blogs.

So first things first – that blog should really be on your own domain, e.g. classysassycouture.com/blog .  It hurts me a little inside when I see people linking out to their blogs. While a popular blog hosted elsewhere can still help develop your brand name, it doesn’t help your site’s search engine rankings very much and it’s not very seamless for the user. One of the benefits of having a blog is that it can attract targeted traffic, and can boost your search engine rankings. But if all that lovely traffic is not going to your own domain, you’re missing out. So I would recommend getting WordPress set up on your site and creating your blog on that. You can export your content from Typepad and import it into a WordPress installation.

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