Topics we’ll cover:

• What is bounce rate?
• How to check your bounce rate in Google Analytics
• What should your bounce rate be?
• Why is your bounce rate so high?
• Are high bounce rates always bad?
• eCommerce and bounce rates
• How can you reduce your bounce rate?

What Is Bounce Rate?

Google’s own definition of bounce rate is: “The percentage of single-page sessions” (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

The first half of this sentence is technically incorrect, because bounce rate is actually the percentage of single interaction visits to your website. But, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick with Google’s definition.

Here is an easy way to think of website bounce rate. Think of a ‘bounce’ as someone landing on your website, not clicking on any other pages and then leaving. The bounce rate is, therefore, the percentage of people that do this, rather than stay and take a look around your website.

How To Check Your Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

You can check your bounce rate inside Google Analytics, under Audience -> Overview

This is your website’s overall bounce rate, but your website actually has multiple bounce rates. The bounce rate of each page tells you the percentage of visitors that landed on that page and ‘bounced’ off. Plus, the bounce rate of each device tells you the percentage of people using mobiles, tablets and desktop computers bounced off, and so on. We’ll look at these different bounce rates later on, so, for now, let’s stick to the overall bounce rate.

What Should My Website Bounce Rate Be?

Your website bounce rate will depend on a number of factors, the key ones being:

The type of traffic you are attracting. Are the visitors to your website specifically looking for your company, or are they looking for information? People who are familiar with you will bounce less than those who are in information-gathering mode. If you’re an eCommerce store, does your traffic have high ‘commercial intent’ (i.e. are they in the mood to buy?), or are they simply researching future purchases?

The sources of your traffic. Visitors that come from Google search results tend to ‘bounce’ much less than visitors from Facebook, for example. People are in very different frames of mind when they’re in work or play modes.

The pages your visitors are landing on. Blog pages tend to have higher bounce rates than product or service pages, for example. If people are coming straight to your homepage, they should not be bouncing off. But if they are landing on an old blog post which doesn’t link to anything else on your website, you should expect a high bounce rate.

The design and layout of your website. Sites that are difficult to navigate, confusing, or look old-fashioned all tend to have higher bounce rates than new clean, easy-to-use, mobile friendly websites. Is your site something that people actually want to look at? If not, they will be leaving.

The clarity of your message. Is it immediately obvious what you do and who your target audience is? People are busy and distracted, so if they can’t find the answer they are looking for, they won’t hunt around to find it — they’ll leave. This is one of the most underrated causes of high bounce rates.

The speed and usability of your website. Slow-loading websites have high bounce rates and low conversion rates. It’s that simple.

As a very broad rule of thumb, you’re aiming for a website bounce rate of under 40%. Between 40% and 55% is usually okay, whilst 55-65% shows significant room for improvement. If your bounce rate is above 90% or below 20%, that often indicates a tracking or code installation error.

This is a very simple and broad rule of thumb, and there are certain circumstances where it might be perfectly okay to have a bounce rate higher than these figures.

Why Is My Bounce Rate So High?

If your bounce rate is above 40%, this might not be cause for alarm. We’ll look now at some legitimate reasons for a higher bounce rate, then we’ll address possible issues.

High Bounce Rate Legitimate Reason 1: Paid Or Social Traffic

If you pick up a high percentage of your traffic from social media or paid ads, this can affect your average bounce rate, as these visitors tend to have a higher bounce rate. In the example below, you’ll see that the bounce rates from paid search (row 4, 88%) and social (row 5, 70.98%) are much higher than from organic search (44.79%), direct traffic (39.76%) and referral traffic (37.83%).

Whilst it’s perfectly normal for paid search traffic to bounce at a higher rate than organic traffic, in this example, the bounce rate is exactly double. This indicates that the targeting of the ads needs to be looked at. Typically, either the ads are pulling in unqualified traffic (perhaps they are showing for phrases that aren’t relevant to the business), or the landing page is not doing a good job of turning the traffic into customers.

In the example below, we see a website with an average bounce rate of 75.33%. This appears to be a massive issue until we examine the traffic sources and see that, because a large percentage of the site’s traffic is coming from social media, the average bounce rate has been skewed. In actual fact, the bounce rate from organic search is 38%. A touch higher than we’d like (30-34%), but certainly not spurting blood.

The main goals for this site should be to:

• Figure out how to keep more of that social traffic longer (mobile responsiveness issues could be key here, see below)
• Work on attracting more organic traffic, as this is currently very low, yet providing the most qualified visitors and the highest number of contact conversions
  

  

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If so, request a FREE marketing review from our expert Marketing Consultants. We’ll take a look at your site and your competitors, and suggest ways that you can decrease your website bounce rate and increase sales from your site. Oh, and did we mention it’s totally free of charge?

High Bounce Rate Legitimate Reason 2: Traffic Hitting Blog Posts

If you’ve been checking our site, you’ll know that writing really awesome blog posts can bring you lots of traffic. But, this traffic is often information seeking traffic, rather than visitors with high commercial intent. So, traffic to blog posts tends to have a higher bounce rate than traffic to your homepage, or other core pages on the site.

Below, we’ll see an example of an accountant’s site with a very good blog. This screen shows the relative bounce rates of the top site pages (white) compared to top blog posts (red). Notice how the bounce rate to the blog pages is very high (93%) compared to the main site pages. You might assume that this indicates the quality of the blog posts is not high, but if you look at ‘Avg. Time on Page’, you’ll notice that, on average, people are spending almost six minutes reading the second blog post.

The question in this scenario becomes how to keep this blog traffic on the site longer. One way to do this is to use lots of relevant internal links to other blog posts, so that the reader can delve deeper into a topic that interests them. Another way to keep these blog visitors on the site longer is to use a call to action at the end of the blog post (duplicated throughout) which is likely to appeal to them.

Remember that blog visitors will often have a lower commercial intent (i.e. they are in the research phase, rather than the buy phase), so it might not always be appropriate to pitch your product or service to them. Instead, consider offering a free mini-course which elaborates on the blog post, requiring their name and email address. Do you have an email list that they can sign up for? Is there a free trial or consultancy that you can offer them?

High Bounce Rate Legitimate Reason 3: Lots Of Mobile Traffic

Visitors on mobile devices bounce more, so if your website receives a high percentage of your traffic from mobile, this will affect your average bounce rate.

Notice how this site receives almost 65% of its traffic from mobile and tablet devices. You’ll also see how the traffic from mobile is bouncing at 53%, which brings the average bounce rate up to 44%.

This mobile bounce rate actually isn’t too bad at all, particularly considering the amount of social media traffic this site gets, so whilst the site owner can always look for more ways to make mobile traffic stick around longer, the reality is that they’re doing a pretty good job already. The desktop bounce rate of 30% is very healthy and shows that the traffic is qualified and the site is user-friendly.

With the number of people now using mobile to browse the web, Google is using this information for indexing. This means it’s more important than ever to make sure that your website looks seamless on a mobile device. Reduce your website bounce rate on mobile by giving the very best user experience on mobile.

Causes Of An Artificially High Or Low Bounce Rate

If your bounce rate is high due to one of the above reasons, then read on to find out how to reduce it and engage more of your traffic. Right now, we will briefly examine some not-so-healthy causes of an artificially high bounce rate.

Evil Cause Of An Artificially High Or Low Bounce Rate 

1: Referral Or Bot Spam

Your website is frequently crawled by bots. Some are nice and friendly (Googlebot crawls your site to read your content and decide where to rank you), whilst others are mean and nasty (some bots are looking for content to scrape and put on spammy sites).

Sometimes, this bot activity is picked up by Google Analytics and can really skew your numbers, because bot traffic can often have a bounce rate of 0% or 100%.

Check out the example below, where you’ll see the average bounce rate for this eCommerce site is 27%. The referral traffic number seems a little high at 64%, bearing in mind that referral traffic is visitors that have landed on the site from a link on another site.

If we click on Referral traffic to examine it more closely, we see that a large proportion of this referral traffic is actually from two bots. You’ll notice the bounce rate of this traffic is very high because it’s not real visitors. This has skewed the referral traffic’s average bounce rate, and thus the site’s average bounce rate.

Cause Of An Artificially High Or Low Bounce Rate 

2: Misconfiguration

Misconfiguration of Analytics can cause some very short-lived celebrations among st site owners delighted to find that a grand total of 0% of their visitors are bouncing off their websites. As they prepare to open a web design school and position themselves as the Mary Portas of the Internet, they realise that Analytics isn’t set up properly and what they’re seeing is less accurate than a politician’s memoirs.

Below is an example of a site with clearly misconfigured Analytics set up. Notice how the bounce rate is always either 100% or 0%?

Some common reasons for Analytics throwing up weird stats are multiple instances of Analytics installed on the same page, code conflicts, or the tracking code being installed in the wrong place (usually the footer).

If you’re seeing some unusual numbers in Analytics, get the Google Tag Assistant extension for Chrome and use it to diagnose the issue.

How To Improve Your Website’s Bounce Rate

Now that we know what sort of bounce rate we’re aiming for and we’ve established the most common causes of a high bounce rate, let’s look at some ways to reduce bounce rate and increase engagement with your website.

The easier visitors find it to use your site, the fewer of them will react with horror and bail. Improving your website’s usability should be a never-ending process of testing, monitoring stats and talking to customers. But, in the interest of giving you something to take away and apply immediately, let’s look at the most common bounce-reducing usability tricks:

Bounce Rate Reducer #1: Clear Navigation

Clear navigation gets people where they need to be, as quickly as possible and with minimum stress and thinking. Look at how the Bathstore.com website gives bath shoppers multiple ways to narrow their selection of baths. Their menu is like a helpful sales person asking: “Do you know what type of bath you are after? No? Okay. Then do you know what style the bathroom is? No? Okay. Then would you like to take a look at all our baths? No? Okay. Then would you like to see a buyers guide to help you choose?” With each option, this awesome navigation guides the lost and confused visitor effortlessly closer to the purchase.

Credit to Exposure Ninja

Inbound linking is one way to improve your website rank and grow traffic. There are many other types of links you can build for better ranking in search engine results.

Let’s have a look at different types of links you can use to make a successful marketing campaign.

Internal Links:

As the name suggests, internal links are hyperlinks that points to another page of the same website. These links allows users to navigate and establish site architecture. Through internal links you can make it easy for crawler to index pages of your website. Here is an internal link to SEO page. (This link points to the SEO page of this website.)

Outbound Links:

Outbound link directs user to a webpage of another website from your website. By having outbound links, you can connect with other websites. You can use them for pointing to useful resource related to your topic. Having outbound links to high authority sites will improve your reputation. With the help of outbound links search engine can find relevant websites. Here is an outbound link. (This link will take you to some more information about outbound links.)

Inbound Links:

Inbound links are also called as backlinks. These links are hyperlinks from another website pointing to your website.

As shown in the above image, xyz website has an external link (outbound link) to your website and your website has an inbound link from xyz website.

Inbound links are important for your ranking because they increase website value. To understand this, let’s take one example. Consider your company representative is promoting your products and services to your prospects. On the other hand your existing clients are praising your products and services.

What do you think? Who will have more impact on your prospects?

Obviously the one who doesn’t belong to your company but still praising you. Your client praising, promoting and referencing your company have more value than promotion done by your company representative. Information received from authority makes is authentic in same way links from authoritative websites gives authenticity to your web page.

Inbound links are same, they represent vote of confidence. But these votes are not that easy to get, you have to build or earn them.  Getting inbound links is as much important as getting them from high authority, good websites rather than low quality, spammy sites.

Good inbound links can boost your website rank whereas bad links may lead you to get penalty and lower rank.

Now you must have got the answer of the question in the title. No, inbound linking doesn’t hurt rankings if they are built with good SEO practices.

Though you have found the answer but still there is much more that you need to know for building healthy inbound links which will help your website to improve its rank in SERPs.

So let’s see how to generate good inbound links:

Do-follow links:

Dofollow is a descriptor of links describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality.

Try to build do-follow links than links with no-follow attribute. In simple words you need votes from people who are happy to recommend you and strongly believe in your quality rather than having unsure votes which says we will recommend you but don’t believe that you are good enough.

Do-follow links pass the ranking power to your page from the web page it is built on. Links with no-follow attribute tells search engine not to follow these links.

You can use no-follow attribute to your outbound links when you are not sure of their quality such as links in comments of your blogs which may lead to spammy sites.

Do-follow link helps to improve authority of your site. But this doesn’t mean that no-follow links are totally useless. Links from high PR sites with no-follow attribute can boost your brand value and also they are useful for getting referral traffic from such high quality sites. You need to keep the balance between these two types of links.

Do-follow links should be more than no-follow links.

There is no standard link ratio that fits for all. Above image just shows sample data which represents the fact that do-follow links should surpass the no-follow links.

Links from Authoritative Sites:

Make sure that you are building links from authoritative sites. You need to connect to the authority blogs and sites to build high quality inbound links. You can reach out to authoritative directories, social bookmarking sites and other type of sources.

When you are getting inbound links from the site having good domain authority then quality score of your link will be increased. You will need to take efforts for getting such links from authoritative sites but once you get it, it will definitely boost your website rank and provides you long term results.

Relevancy:

You can improve the relevance of your inbound links by focusing on following factors:

1. Build inbound links from relevant sites of your industry or topic to make them more effective.
2. Content should be relevant with your link. Content tells search engine what your page is about. Relevant content increases the value of link it contains and also grows your website traffic through improved user experience.
3. As discussed in our blog “Importance of anchor text in Back-links”, relevant keywords in anchor text play an important role in getting higher rank for relevant search terms.

Avoid Paid Links:

Some sites offer you link in return of payment. Buying links is considered as spam technique and Google can remove your website from its index because of having paid links. Paid links have time limit, after certain period the link expires or breaks.

So natural link building is the best way to improve your website rank than paying for links. As Google may penalize paid links and can damage website’s linking profile and brand value.

These are some proven strategies to generate good inbound links. I hope this article will help you to build quality inbound links which will affect your ranking positively. If I’ve missed any strategy then please mention it in comments. Also you can send us any queries regarding this topic or any other digital marketing strategy, we are glad to help you with inbound linking.

This change may confuse your site visitors or surprise you if you are not expecting it.

Starting with the release of Chrome 56 this month, any website that is not running HTTPS will have a message appear in the location bar that says “Not Secure” on pages that collect passwords or credit cards.

It will look like this:

This is the first part of a staged rollout that encourages websites to get rid of plain old HTTP.

In an upcoming release Google Chrome will label all non-HTTPS pages in incognito mode as “Not secure” because users using this mode have an increased expectation of privacy.

The final step in the staged rollout will be that Chrome will label all plain HTTP pages as “Not secure”. It will look like this:

The impact on WordPress site owners

So, once again, starting on approximately January 31st of this month, any page on your website that is non-HTTPS and has a password form or credit card field will be labeled as “Not secure” in the location bar by Google Chrome. This includes your WordPress login page.

This may confuse your site visitors who sign in to your website because they may interpret the message to indicate that your website has been compromised. They could also interpret the message to mean that your site has some underlying security issue other than being non-HTTPS.

The current timeline for the release of Chrome 56 is unclear. The official statement from Google indicates it will be released some time in “January”. However, based on the Chromium development calendar it looks like Chrome 56 may be released on January 31st. You’ll notice that calendar says “Estimated stable dates” and is subject to change.

Assuming Chrome 56 will be released on January 31st, that gives you two weeks starting today to get your site running on 100% SSL to avoid the new “Not secure” message appearing on your login pages.

What to do if your site is not HTTPS

We recommend you start by looking at the support documentation that your hosting provider offers to find out how to set up SSL on their system. You will find that some hosting providers offer free SSL and others have a very easy installation method.

If you ignore this and decide to configure things manually you may be making life more difficult for yourself.

Google has a technical description of how to implement SSL on your website. You will also find many guides describing how to set up SSL for WordPress with a simple Google search.

But definitely start by visiting your hosting provider support documentation or doing a google search for your hosting provider name and ‘SSL installation’ without quotes.

If you have already set up SSL on your site, congratulations!  You are all set and ready for the new change in Chrome 56 coming later this month.

Please share this with the broader WordPress community to promote the use of SSL across all websites and to help other WordPress site owners stay secure.

SSL Security

Credits to Suma Designs

With the advent of so many social media platforms, business owners are often confused into deciding which one is right for them, let alone which ones are the keepers.

You usually only need a few that you can manage, in the beginning. Later on, when your business grows, you can eventually take over other social media channels as well and mark your presence everywhere.

But what exactly do you need to do to boost your business via these social media channels? Here are seven highly effective social media tricks that will not only promise traffic but higher conversion rates as well. Read on to boost your business for good:

Keep an eye on the trends

Posting updated and current information that is in relevance with your niche is a great way to sneak into your audience’s mind. In order to successfully do so, there are online tools that can help you out in the matter. BuzzSumo is great for analyzing what topics are taking over by storm and who are the key influencers. Another great tool is social-searcher.com. It helps the users to see how the chosen keywords are treated by various social media networks.

Customized post descriptions

Whether you are sending a Tweet, or posting something on Facebook, custom formatting is important. It is to ensure that you are speaking the language of your customers (which you are obviously familiar with). Also add in emoji or a symbol to spice things up in your post. Even if you are reposting or retweeting, don’t just share away. Customize it, add in symbols and twist the gist of the post in a language that your audience is familiar with.

Add social media buttons on your website

Adding social media buttons on your website can also do the trick. Usually, social media pages are filled with all kinds of posts which makes them interesting to browse, comparatively. A smartweb design agency would have already done that for you in a very convenient way – on each page and with each blog post on your blog as well. This will trigger an increase in social shares for your blog posts directly from your website.

Plan and schedule in advance

Not keeping an eye on the events that matter to your targeted audience can turn them away. In order to stay on top of the game, use scheduling tools to schedules posts in advance. Buffer is a good scheduling tool to begin with as its super easy to use, and free. By using this, you will not have to post content while you are at a Christmas dinner – be at peace.

Write longer and well researched posts

Twitter may give you a hard time here but you can use Google Plus for writing longer posts. If you write posts that are detailed and well researched, including statistics, chances are they will ignite conversations from the audience. Given the short attention spans, it is also imperative to make use of visual cues, graphs and other supportive visuals to keep the reader from going anywhere else.

Insert subtle call to actions (CTAs)

CTAs are important as they trigger a sense of action into the customer. To play this fairly, use power words that are also able to emotionally connect with the customers. Say if you are a photographer, and your specialty is wedding photography, as you share an advertising post about yourself on Facebook you may want to use one of these in the end: “Make your weddings perfect with wedding photography!” or… “Don’t let your special moments slip by, have them captured.” You can easily tell that the latter is playing an emotional game with the minds of the customers.

Go with the flow

Social media platforms often change their guidelines, leaving you with either of the two choices to take into account: either embrace the change, or simply don’t. If you choose the former option, you have done well for you have chosen to take on the battlefield that was left abandoned by those who gave up the fight. Stay on the lookout for the changes and adapt to them, instantly, to make the most out of them and become an opportunist.

Small business owners are often occupied with so many other marketing maneuvers that they almost forget about extracting the most benefits out of the social media platforms. The tricks mentioned above take the least possible time and consume very little, or none, from your marketing budget. Give these some forethought before you begin and continue to reap the benefits of social media marketing as a result.