High Bounce with Long Time on Page - Good or Bad?

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

I have few articles on my site that are quite good both SEO wise (getting organic search traffic) and as a reading material.

They get lots of traffic and people are staying and reading them (2-4 minutes on page).

The problem with these articles is that people are reading them and then leave. These are landing pages for certain queries so I assume that the readers are getting what they wanted but when they finish they exit.

The bounce rate is 70%-85%.

Are these type of pages good or bad for my site?

Last note, my site is an e-commerce store. I do try to "motivate" more people to navigate to other pages but the majority do and will probably leave (because they were looking for answers and not products).

Needless to say that the articles are related to my site's subjects and products.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

To reduce the bounce rate of your landing pages, you can have some teasers on them that lead to other pages. For one of my clients, I did the same. I added product related textual and graphical teasers to the landing pages with high bounce rate. When the visitors clicked on those teasers they are taken to another page on the same website that will have some how to videos and / or slides. This strategy worked pretty well for my client. One thing that you have to remember is that when including teasers on these high bounce pages, these should be tightly related or belong to the same subject matter of these host pages they reside in.

Coming to the question related to if high bounce rate is good or bad, it all depends on the purpose behind the existence of these pages. Take for example, a visitor lands on a Wikipedia page in search of a topic. He reads the article and leaves Wikipedia. In this case, the page on Wikipedia served the purpose behind its existence and the visitor got what he wanted. Bounce rate on Wikipedia is good in this regard.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.