1.05 % Bounce Rate! What Are You Talking About?

1.05 % Bounce Rate! What Are You Talking About?

When I first tweeted about this, the first response from a friend in the SEO industry was- Is it a joke? I said no, and thought, why not share the complete details.

We have been consulting clients about conversion optimization, usability and engagement on the website and social channels and bounce rate is a great measure to test the level of engagement on your website and its usability for a visitor.

We revamped this website few months back to make it more engaging. The whole team sat together to ensure the website was perfect in terms of structure and usability for the visitor. We critically analyzed the requirements of the visitors and made sure that they be served in the best way possible. Every SEO parameter was taken into consideration before the website was revamped.

The new website went live in November and the graph below shows the weekly traffic pattern. Please remember it is a B2B website and in December the traffic usually goes down for a services website, it being the festive season. But, we found that suddenly the number of leads coming through the website had increased. I started analyzing the website and got the statistics as below-

Visits Compared to Bounce rate for Last 2 months

We could see a sudden increase in the traffic after pages got indexed… and then came the big surprise! Less than 10% bounce rate! The bounce rate dropped even more than our expectations! The above graph compares visits versus bounce rate and you can see the sudden drop in second week of November when the new website went live.

Bounce Rate for Last 2 Months

I thought… why not explore it a little further. So, I went through the pages to look at how individual pages were performing and saw that a lot of pages which had a high bounce rate were from the blog where you normally have a higher bounce rate, because people come, read your latest post and leave.

To analyze the web traffic, I have a custom segment which eliminates the blog section and then you can actually analyze the website; I selected the segment and the response was-

Website Usage

For a search engine optimization expert, this is more than a dream come true!

Below are the last 2 months’ analytics’ snapshots to provide a better understanding:

 Now, the million dollar question is… HOW DID WE MANAGE TO DO IT?

What were the key points in considerations and what SEO and content measures were followed to make the impossible happen! Stay tuned and I would let out the secrets a little later!

Would love to see your comments and thoughts.