Search Engine Marketing and Bounce Rates

By Ricci Mathew

A website needs to be optimized for the search engines and hence online business website owners always get services from professional SEO/SEM (search engine optimization/marketing) companies. An ongoing SEM campaign will definitely bring in a lot of traffic, but it must be useful traffic. One must be very clear of the objective of a web page or website. Only when the required click or conversion is done by the visitor, one can say that our effort has been successful. This is where the bounce rate has to be considered and monitored. What is a bounce rate?

A bounce rate refers to the rate at which people "reject" a page on which they have landed. If we use an analytical software or Google Analytics (GA) it becomes possible for us to see reports about everything that the website visitor does and searches inside the website. Generally speaking if the visitor sees only one page of the website it is said to be a bounce. Some web analytics go by the time factor. Spending less than 10 seconds on a web page is enough reason to call it a reject. A bounce rate information and very useful for us to study and improve our online marketing efforts. Bounce rates can be measured for the different keywords and we can identify and isolate those keywords that have a high bounce rate. In such an instance one will be required to examine the content. Is it not what the visitors wanted? What can you do on that page to retain the visitor's presence?

Bounce rates can also be monitored and we can identify those websites that are sending us traffic that are not of the right quality. Thus if we have traffic inflow into our website from 4 different websites and identify that all visitors that came in from one particular website immediately left, then we will come to know something needs to be changed at that point. Thus what are the different factors that determine the bounce rate?

* Search engine ranking of the page
* Type of Audience
* Advertisements
* Survey requests
* Landing Page Design
* Ad and Landing Page Messages
* Emails and Newsletters
* Load time of the web page
* Links to external sites

Online marketing efforts are often directly measured by the conversion rates. If by modifying or changing the webpage content there is a significant change in the percentage of bounce rate and we are able to get more clicks and conversions then we have succeeded. It just shows how well our website visitors are reading our content based on keywords delivering traffic to the website. Online marketing sites must use good and effective web analysis tools and keep their bounce rates at a minimum level.

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