The bounce rate of a dealer’s website seems to be the biggest concern lately. There are a few things you must understand, especially if you hired an SEO Firm to optimize your website. If they did a good job, you will find that your bounce rate increased. On the surface that doesn’t sound very good right? It actually is good, and I’ll tell you why.

Look At Your Dealer Stats:

You may be proud that your bounce rate is at 20%. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but look at your top 10 keywords. I would bet that most of them contain your dealer name right? This searches are looking for you, so you can be assured they will not become a bounce. I’m sorry to inform you, but you cannot really credit that with your internet department. These are people driving by your dealership, or perhaps someone who saw your TV ad and forgot what your domain name was. Now I would hope that you rank first on all of your dealership’s queries, but you really can’t count that as seo. That’s a gimme.

The more organic traffic you get, the higher your bounce rate will be:

Here’s the problem. Yourself or a good SEO company will obviously optimize your website or misrosite for local traffic, using city and state related keywords. It wouldn’t make sense to target the word “Chevrolet Dealership”. Not only would it be costly, but why would you want Alaska traffic going to your website if you’re located in Miami Florida? If it was an easy keyword to rank on, I’d say go for it. That would be a great Google Map Phrase to advertise with the local business center, but to rank on that keyword phrase in searches would cost 10′s of thousands of dollars.

The reason why your bounce rate goes up is simple. The more you optimize your website, the more organic traffic you get by accident. This morning, my Orlando Dealer got a visit from a user that searched for light blue toyota sienna 2009 on Google. There was no mention of the word “Orlando”, or “Florida”. Here is another example:

The odds that this click was from the Florida area is pretty slim, therefore this will be a sure bounce. The more of these impressionsyou get, the higher your bounce rate will be. This unique long-tailed search term was number one on Google out of 3/4 of a million websites.

This was an accidental visit, and the odds of that person being located near Florida is pretty slim. That keyword phrase even shows up in Google’s UK Servers. So the odds of this visitor becoming a bounce is favorable.

How a bounce is calculated?

“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.” – Says Wikipedia

This makes it obvious that you have to be careful which stats program to use. Never trust stats that a vendor gives you. Always use a third party program like Google Analytics. If you use a vendors stats, they can set their bounce rate to be “anyone who enters and stays for more than 2 second will not be a bounce”. I have also found that many stats programs count spiders as visits. That is so wrong! You know how many spiders are out there crawling around? Some shady SEO Companies can write bot codes to crawl your site too, to make it look like human traffic.

This is what Google says about their bounce rate:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” —Says Google

Now if you were selling CD’s which could be shipped anywhere, this wouldn’t be applicable to you, but you are selling a high dollar items. Cars that many people just won’t buy without kicking the tires, or seeing it in person. Why would somebody from California buy a car in Miami Florida? Unless it’s Jay Leno, I don’t see it happening.

There are factors in other niches as well:

“While bounce rate is a useful tool for e-commerce sites, it is of more questionable value for sites such as news and information, where many visitors go to scan headlines and conduct research, and can find what they want immediately on the entry page. Indeed, for any kind of informational site, sophisticated users are likely to bookmark a page within the site, which then becomes their personal entry page, check it (e.g., for sports scores, the price of pork bellies etc.), then bounce right off. The page will have done its job, but might still have a bounce rate above 80%, bringing up the average for the whole site. For such sites, metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative and should be used to understand the overall picture better.” —-Says Wikipedia

Read more about Bounce Rates on Wikipedia here.