The bounce rate on your legal blog is generally not worth measuring nor worth trying to improve.
Bounce rate is an Internet marketing/SEO term used in web traffic analysis, often looked at by law firms and legal marketing professionals in measuring the success of their websites – and legal blogs.
It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Bounce rate is calculated by counting the number of single page visits and dividing that by the total visits. It is then represented as a percentage of total visits.
Google sends me a monthly report on my blog’s web traffic. I noticed was my bounce rate was about 1% or slightly more.
Thinking that was pretty low, I felt a bit inferior to the ”big boys.”
Then I stumble across a video program on SEO and Internet marketing for lawyers with leading authorities, Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam.
They were talking bounce rate. Gyi said time again law firms get worried about bounce rate in situations when its not applicable.
For example in the case of a legal blog, people come to a unique blog post via a Google search, blog subscription, citation of the post in another publication or a sharing of the blog post on social media.
It’s the blog post – and reading it – that has the person coming to your blog.
One post, and that’s it.
And this is great as the legal blogger is recognized as a niche authority by others causing the blogger’s posts to be cited, found on search and shared.
Bounce rate is a measure of “stickiness.”
The thinking being that an effective website will engage visitors deeper into the website. Encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of single page visits to total visits.
Thus my 1%. Folks are reading on of my posts and leaving.
Bounce rates are helpful to measure the effectiveness of an entry or landing page when selling goods. You want people to explore and buy more – and there’s a track record that they do.
But one doing legal research or reading a blog by subscription is not looking to peruse a law firm or practice groups and other lawyers.
So beating yourself up – as I have – for having a high bounce rate on your blog is a little foolish.
In legal blogging, focus on reputation and relationship building so as to build your business.
Bounce rate may be worth looking at, but I’d leave the major focus on bounce rate in the case of legal blogs to others.