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One question we get asked all the time is: what is a good bounce rate?  A bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your website, stay on the page they landed on, then leave.  The bounce rate alone can not tell us how your site is performing.

For example, the bounce rate on our home page is 40%.  All that tells us is that 40% of the people who come to our site don’t view any other pages.

While this initially sounds like a bad thing, it’s not always.

For instance, we try to include contact info in the header or footer of every site we make.  This way, if a visitor is only looking for your contact info, they don’t need to visit other pages.  The land on a page, see the contact info – the very thing they were looking for – and leave.  Their action gets logged as a bounce, but in reality, the visitor found exactly what they wanted.

I use this example to illustrate that there are other factors to look at when looking at your bounce rate.  A good rule of thumb is any bounce rate above 70% is bad AND any bounce rate below 30% is bad.  You want to shoot between 35% and 55%.  But you also want to look at where the traffic came from.

If you have a high bounce rate and your traffic is coming from online advertising then you might not be delivering what your ads boast – or at least it’s not readily accessible.  Try featuring your site’s hot spots around the content of your online ads or direct the ads to landing pages directly associated with the product or service you’re selling.

If you’ve got a bounce rate below 30%, this can be an indicator that no one is finding you through organic searches.

See how your site traffic is finding your site before you worry about your bounce rate.

One of the most biggest things search engines look at when determining your rank is incoming links.  The idea is this: website A thinks site B is great, so they link to it.  Search engines interpret that site A thinks site B is a good, credible site and takes that into account when determining B’s rank.  So it makes sense to assume that if sites A, C, D, E,F….Z all link to site B, then site B will thrive in the search rank.

Right?

Sadly, no.

While search engines do rely heavily on the incoming links to you site, the inbound links all have to be from credible websites.  What makes a credible website?  We’ll go deeper into site credibility in the next couple days, but in the meantime, here’s what you should take home: Do not use any paid backlink service.  Many of these services guarantee hundreds if not thousands of links to your site, but the incoming links are far from credible.  Most of the linking sites are simple database sites filled with pages and pages of links to sites.  Incoming links from sites with bad raps could severely damage the credibility of your website.

The character of a man is defined by the caliber of people he surrounds himself with.  The same can be said about your website.  What kind of company does your site keep?