Bounce rate and average visit time in an e-commerce site

[stefaanva]

Dear all,

I am managing a Belgian online pharmacy (www.pharma2go.be) . The online pharmacy has a quite high bounce rate (+/- 79%) and low avg. visit time (< 1 minute).

This could somehow be related to a choices that have been made in the past to also build the site in English (but without English product texts available - only Dutch and French). The reason is that people all over Europe could order.

Another reason could be that also product on prescription are shown which cannot be ordered. This was chosen to still offer the visitors the product leaflets as a service.

I am wondering if it would be beneficial for SEO to remove the English version and the on prescription  products. At least if this would lower bounce rate and increase the average visit time.

Thanks for your input.

Kindest regards,

Stefaan

[Keszi]

Hi Stefaan,

My question would be the following: Did you try to segment the pages? I mean You can look at the general numbers, but maybe you have something on the product pages where people bounce away or you can have something on category pages, or maybe you are targeting your home page instead of targeting the "language" pages.

Try to look at more detailed numbers (this way you will have a better knowledge of what, where and why? at least this is what I am trying to get out from the web analytics in these cases).

I hope that helped,

Istvan

P.S. If you need help then maybe if I can have a look in the Analytics number I can give you a more specified reason.

[stefaanva]

Hi Istvan,

Thanks for your response. If you give me your email adress I can give you access to our Google anaytics. I would really appreciate your opinion on it.

Regards,

Stefaan

[AlanMosley]

Bouce rates should be seen as reletive, you may have a site that ranks for a lot of keywords that dont convert, there are many reasons why you can have a high bouce rate.
I would not worry so much. if it suddly moves then i would wonder why, but if it is constant, then so be it.

You can look at what keywords are causing the bounce, that may explain it .

[stefaanva]

Tx Alan.

I asked the question since somebody from an SEO company told us that our bounce rate and visit time were not good. That we should strive towards numbers usch as 40% bounce rate and visit time of avg 2 minutes. That is why I try to understand the reasons behind.

If I understand you well, you don't think this impacts substantially our rankings?

Regards,

Stefaan

[AlanMosley]

no,

Bing for example will see if your result is clicked on, and if that user cames back and searches for the same keyword again within a short period of time, then they will see your result as a bad resullt and you will loose rankings, google may do somthing like this also, BUT, this is per keyword, keywords where the user finds your site as a good result will continue to rank.

Image you have a page about geology, called The Stones, you may get a lot of rolling Stones fans comming to your site, but see its about rocks, and not rock music and leave again, giving you a high bouce rate, but this would not affect your rankings for geology.

If you had a site all about the Paris of greek mythology, you may get a lot of hits but a high bouce rate because of people looking for the Paris the city or Paris Hilton, but if you had a site about Hecuba the mother of Paris of greek mythology, then i would say you would get fewer hits but with a lower bounce rate, but in the end you would prorobaly get somthing like the same amount of genuine vists to both.

[stefaanva]

Tx Alan for the clear explanation