Just moving the call to action into the first viable frame of the page can have a huge effect on visitor conversions. The less scrolling the better and any elements your directing your visitors towards are best placed “above the fold”.

An online store with a very targeted market will have a fairly high bounce rate because of the simple fact that it’s target market is more focused. Casual surfers will hit a keyword that might call the site, regardless of if the product on offer is applicable to them or not, ie. if one was looking for a ‘T-shirt’ when the store might ONLY be offering ‘Wool T-shirts’.

It seems while bounce is important and worth looking at, the importance will vary greatly on what sort of site it is and what the audience might be. Ultimately, if the site has a low translation of visits to sales, in the case of e-com, then regardless of how good the bounce rate might be, it’s failing.

With blogs, for instance, a high bounce rate shouldn’t be considered necessarily a negative thing, since there you want your visitors to quickly scan and read posts, which are almost always on the landing/home page. In a blog return visitors are way more important than bounce rate (which tells you little about how interesting your content is). Also, for university pages, where the home page contains links to external pages ( e.g a university site with the different faculty pages) the bounce rate for this page would be 100% most of the time but this doesn’t reflect the actualy performance of the site.

If you want to increase usability, put the phone number in the banner. Visitors who are just looking for your phone number will easily find it by searching for your business name and staying on your page just long enough to dial. One page visit = bounce.

If you really want to help visitors (AND you actually want phone calls) put the phone number in the title tag and they won’t even need to come to your site. Of course, if you did a good job on Google Local, they’d have it anyway.

Bottom line is, using a bounce rate as the sole measure of success can lead to unexpected results…not all of them good.

This was a great article. Very thorough. I just wanted to add my 2-cents.

Your website is no good when most visitors bounce off right away. Consider thee usability and SEO measures to retain them and to get more conversions.

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