Like all professional SEO specialists, we here at MyCity Social create and link Google Analytics accounts to all of our client websites. Google analytics is a very powerful and useful tool that is used by many an SEO Specialist when it comes to gathering information about the traffic that comes to a website. Part of this data focuses specifically on user behavior which is a necessary component to online success. For example, visit duration, what pages visitors landed on, which pages they clicked next, and where they dropped off.
What Is a Visitor Drop Off?
A drop off is when a visitor lands on your site and almost immediately clicks off the page or even exits the website altogether. This is a problem as Orlando SEO Specialists work hard to obtain visits to your website that are relevant, and the entire purpose it to have visitors STAY on the website. Google penalizes websites with high bounce and exit rates.
What is The Bounce Rate?
The Bounce rate shows the percentage of people who only visited one page and then immediately left to another page or exited altogether.
What Is The Exit Rate?
The exit rate is a factor that shows the percentage of people who left a website when they landed on a particular page. What is great about Google Analytics is that it can show you more specific information about exit rate such as whether the person landed on your page and exited immediately, or if they were on several pages beforehand and then on the final page they visited, exited there.
In general, the bounce rate only measures people who have visited a SINGLE page before leaving, while the exit rate analyzes the total percentage of page views to the particular page that resulted in them leaving the website.
Blog posts typically have a higher bounce rate than most other typical website pages as visitors will often read and then leave. To combat this, it is essential to include links to other relevant pages, place “similar posts” sections below a post, and even forms to prompt more action.
If you find that there is a page with a high bounce/exit rate it is time to dig in and see why. Is the page loading slowly? Are there broken images appearing? Is the title completely irrelevant to the content? In addition, you can also see what source all of the bouncing visitors are coming from. If a specific source is sending visitors to your link that is completely irrelevant to what you offer, you can then work on fixing that issue.
As for exit rates, remember that it takes several factors into consideration. Not all exits are necessarily a bad thing. If you own an e-commerce website for example, once a visitor makes a purchase and leaves the checkout page that is actually a natural and positive result. It is important always to look at both exit and bounce rate metric when making important strategic marketing decisions.
Knowledge is power, and with bounce/exit rates, Orlando SEO Specialists have the tools to properly diagnose and fix the situation. Call MyCity Social today to get started with your SEO plan and be on your way to obtaining more sales from your website.
