Any small business with a website will no doubt have come across SEO experts who make several claims, in fact I even get emails from these people several times a week.

Before you spend your hard earned cash on an SEO service it’s worth bearing in mind the 6 points below, what ever you do if the “expert” matches two or more of the points below we would strongly suggest that you walk away.

It is important to note that all of these points are based on the Google guidelines that you may or may not have heard of and that can be read here.

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Recently, I’ve seen several conversations in various marketing and SEO forums about bounce rates and what is a good or poor bounce rate so I thought I would put together a few thoughts about it as it relates to many small business websites.

What is bounce rate?

Technically, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit your site and leave the site without visiting any other page so, if you have 100 visitors with 20 of them landing on a page (any page) and then leaving the site without looking at another page you would have a 20% bounce rate.  The visitor could be leaving your site in any one of several ways :-

1. They click the “back” button and go back to the page they have come from (usually a page of search results).
2. They type a new URL (web address) into the browser address bar
3. They do nothing and remain on the page (most software based bounce rate calculations kick in if the visitor doesn’t change their page in 30 minutes or so, although some software will reduce the time to as little as 15 minutes).
4. They close the browser window or tab.

What is a good bounce rate?

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I was watching Tweets earlier today and noticed this one from Jason Houck ( http://weighyourmind.com/consulting/ ) appear on my timeline and it immediately struck a chord with me both in relationship to traditional and online marketing. Continue reading →