You can control which keywords drive visitors to your website. PPC, for example, offers the most control over visitor quality. By selecting the correct terms to bid on, you can ensure that visitors who land on your website are interested in what you have to offer. To measure the quality of the keywords driving visitors to your website, you should examine the bounce rate at the keyword level. Higher-quality keywords targeted to match the landing pages should have a bounce rate of 20% or less. If you notice a specific term has a bounce rate higher than 20%, you should ask the following questions:
In some instances, certain words carry different meanings in different industries. If visitors are using the keyword in another context, you should try to eliminate that word to avoid driving lower-quality visitors to your website.
In some instances, you are targeting the correct words; however, the particular landing page design does not appeal to visitors. If that is the case, you will have to redesign the landing pages to appeal to your market.
Table 2-11 shows the top landing pages report for one of our client websites. Each top page has a high bounce rate in the 70% range. At first glance, this might indicate that the design or copy of these pages is not appealing to visitors. But it is too early to make such a judgment.
Table 2-12 breaks down page 1 traffic from the top landing page report based on the keyword that drives visitors to the page. The results show that “Kw1,” which drives 59.60% of that page’s entrances, has the highest bounce rate of 82.40%. Let’s exclude “Kw1” from the page calculations and see the impact on the bounce rate for the page:
| Page entrances excluding “Kw1” entrances = 7,890 – 4,759 = 3,131 entrances |
| Page bounces excluding “Kw1” bounces = 5,791 – 3,921= 1,870 bounces |
| Page bounce rate excluding “Kw1” = 1,870 / 3,131 = 60% |