Bounce rates refer to one of the most used, and most important website traffic analytics used in SEO to determine a site’s performance. A “bounce” alludes to a person that gets to your site and leaves without further interacting with other pages.

Bounce rates, then, are the percentage of people who get into your site and immediately leave. It is calculated by taking all the single-page sessions your website gets and dividing that number by the number of total sessions received.

Generally speaking, high bounce rates are considered a bad thing, while low bounce rates tend to be desirable. Having said that, there’s a bit more to unpack than just that.

Is a high bounce rate always bad?

More often than not, yes.

Very rarely does a website success hinges on viewers interacting with a single page, but in such cases, a high bounce rate would make sense. Like it happens with some blogs. However, if your site works as most do, using landing pages to “convert” visitors making them visit other parts of the site, then high bounce rates are bad.

Some studies suggest that average bounce rates sit around 58%. However, B2B sites tend to see higher rates than B2C oriented ones.

How to optimize for lower bounce rates?

Decreasing a site’s bounce rates are one of the most common optimization tasks you’ll want to undertake.

Your site-wide bounce rate is too broad of a metric to be readily usable. Instead, it’s a good practice to study your demographics and analyze how they respond to different parts of your content. Study your site and try to come up with a few hypotheses on what may be causing such demographics to leave before taking action. Then, set yourself specific goals, conduct some A/B testing modifying elements that might affect the results and track the performance.

Before long, you should start noticing changes in your site’s bounce rates and can tweak aspects of your content accordingly.