Bounce rate can be your best friend and worst enemy. You have invested years into perfecting your website. You believe you have got the page structure spot on, the call to action just right, the images reflect your services and your carefully sculptured keyword rich text is grammatically correct and reads beautifully.
In many cases this forethought will get you the leads you have aspired to achieve, what do you do if it doesn’t…
Due to your well thought out SEO campaign you have successfully targeted your big generic phrases, and you have a long tail keyword campaign in place because we all know no two people will search for phrases in the same way. You have the traffic in excess of 20,000 people visiting the site each month BUT of this traffic over 60% are landing on your site are bouncing straight off. You can see that figure glaring at you every time you log into analytics.
Google Blogspot has an excellent article about identifying which sites are sending you the most traffic that bounces, and also how to identify which pages people are most offended by, but for me that doesn’t answer the question of why, and what is it that 60% of my traffic is looking for that this website is not offering them?
Using one of the simplest searches in Google Analytics (which I will come to in a second) you can start to build yourself a spreadsheet of long tail keywords that people are finding your site for, the pages that relate to these phrases (using the advice in Google Blogspot) and set about putting pen to paper or furious typing to amend your woes and finally give your readers what it is they want.
If you go to “Traffic Sources” > Keywords > View Full Report. Click on “Bounce Rate” so your order your list of keywords by 100% bounce rate. This will give you some really nice longtail keyword combinations that your visitors are already finding you for, and you are failing to answer the questions they have. Using this information you can either improve the content on the relevant pages, or use the query as a basis for your blog posts.
If you want to gain further insight into your pages: Content > View Full Report > Order by Bounce Rate > Cross Segment by “keyword”. You can then add this to your main analytics dashboard for future reference.
Give it a try, it will give you endless months of blog titles, you are increasing your user experience, and lowering your bounce rate. I could have saved myself a lot of head scratching thinking of what users might want had I thought of it sooner!