Your bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and don’t click through to another page. Your analytics package should tell you which pages have a high bounce rate. Pay attention to this number because it is a negative and you need to do what you can to reduce the bounce rate.

Instead of looking at your average bounce rate across the entire website, which isn’t very useful, look at the bounce rates for your individual pages. Most websites have high bounce rates (somewhere around 70%-80%), but you don’t have to. You want to get that bounce rate below 50% if possible. Find out what your site visitors are looking for and provide them with information that will help them achieve it.

Bounce rates differ from industry to industry too. Are your site visitors just looking for information or are they looking to buy a product or service. If they are looking to buy something and all you have is information then you’ll get high bounce rates. If they are looking for information and you have products or services to sell then you will have high bounce rates. If either of these is the case then you are likely targeting the wrong keywords and phrases or you are not making the right offerings. It could be a combination of the two. To fix it, do a little deeper analysis of your site visitors’ needs and tweak your web pages to provide that or create new web pages and drive your visitors there.

Your bounce rate is a very important statistic and says a lot about what your visitors really need. It all starts with web development and builds from there.