Is a High Bounce Rate Always a Problem?

Bounce rate is how often visitors to your site click on only one page, the one that turns up on a search results page, and then navigate away from the site. For example, a “bounce” is when a visitor clicks on a blog post on your site but does not navigate to your homepage, your attorney profiles, your practice area pages, or your contact form. The opposite is if the user clicks on multiple pages on your site and, ideally, fills out a contact form. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts have given varying opinions about how much bounce rate affects your site. If it affects it at all, it is only one of many ranking factors. In fact, sometimes it can even be good if a user only visits one page on your site. Reducing your bounce rate should not be your highest priority, but regularly updating your site with high quality legal blog content should.

When Visiting a Single Page on Your Site and Then Bouncing Can Be a Good Thing

Not everyone who visits a law firm website is looking to hire a lawyer in the near future; many visitors just have general questions about the law. For example, if a user types “what is the minimum wage in Illinois” or “is Florida a community property state or equitable distribution,” your site is providing a valuable service by providing a straightforward answer to those questions. Your website has met the user’s needs if the user can find the answer on the first page they visit. Time on page is not even an accurate measure of the site’s usefulness. The search has been a success if the user just sees the sentence, “Florida is an equitable distribution state” and then goes back to eating a tuna melt, writing a novel where a character is talking about her previous marriage, or whatever the user was doing before it occurred to them to Google a question about your practice area.

How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Of course, if you can get casual visitors to your site to stay awhile, even better. Increasing time on page and conversion rate are admirable goals, even if they are not the ultimate purpose of content marketing. You can entice visitors to stay longer by writing blog posts that people will want to read all the way through, even if their original purpose in navigating to the site was to find a simple answer to a legal question. Likewise, you can encourage people to click on other pages within your site by adding internal links to your blog post, linking to your practice area pages, your contact page, and even other blog posts.

The moral of the story is that you should not redo your entire site or trash years’ worth of content just to chase a ranking factor that a self-proclaimed content marketing expert is the next big thing. Google’s algorithms are always changing, and trying to keep up with the whims of search engine bots will benefit your website and your law firm by focusing on valuable content and a comfortable user experience.

Give Readers an Answer Quickly and Then Make Them Want to Stay

Creating binge worthy content on a law firm website is a tall order, but the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers are up to the task.