How To Lower Bounce Rate For Your Law Firm’s Website

Question:

What is your experience with bounce rates and what is a more or less, acceptable bounce rate number? I’m sitting somewhere near 70 to 80 percent. Do you have any tricks or hacks you can implement to decrease this?

Answer:

“Bounce” is when somebody goes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages. They read your homepage and then they click the back button and go back to Google. That would be considered a bounce. Let’s say they go to your website and then they read the page and then they close the browser. That’s also considered a bounce. Bounces are not always a bad thing.

A lot of people think a bounce rate is going to be a bad thing. It’s not always a bad thing. Let’s say someone named, Google’s personal injury attorney clicks on your website and likes what you have to say. He calls the number at the top of the screen, books a consultation and then closes the browser. Technically that’s considered a bounce even though the outcome was the exact outcome that you’re going for. You’re trying to get people to find you and book a phone call. You can’t just rely on the bounce rate alone. You have to kind of look at the bounce rate into consideration with the totality of these circumstances.

Another thing to look at is if your website overall has a high bounce rate. Next, look and see if some of your blog posts are getting a lot of are getting the majority of the traffic. Blog posts typically will have a higher bounce rate. Just think about how many times you end up reading a blog and then leaving the page without actually going, even if you love the content in the blog how often do you actually then go through and search the rest of the website. It’s probably not that often so if you start looking at individual pages I’d probably pay more attention to the home page bounce rate and the landing page bounce rates also.

I can’t stress this enough bounce rate is not always a horrible thing. Our client’s websites typically have bounce rates anywhere from 50 to 70 percent and these are firms that do pretty well. Once the bounce rate starts getting a little high than 70% then we start kind of taking a look at it and figuring out okay let’s try to get this at least under 70% but for the most part bounce rate. We don’t pay too much attention to bounce rate especially if they’re getting a lot of blog traffic if they’re getting phone calls, all the type of stuff. You kind of have to look at the entire circumstance but as for us, we don’t really freak out until we start getting above 70 and even closer to 80% that’s when we’re kind of like okay, let’s see we can do to dial this back so there’s that.