A search engine marketing firm, Slingshot SEO, got me thinking about bounce rates a few weeks ago. Sure, we've all heard that traffic, clicks, and conversion are all good ways to measure our marketing and corporate blogging efforts, but how many of us are paying attention to bounce rate? What sort of research are we doing in comparing bounce rates of our blogs vs. our landing pages vs. our website?

Slingshot believes that Google will one day (if they are not already doing so) take bounce rates into consideration when determining how to rank landing pages. It makes a lot of sense -- if 99% of the people who hit your page leave as quickly as they're able to, something isn't clicking. Getting those kinds of stats aren't difficult - it's making sense of them. "What" leads to bounce rate? The same things that apply to a website definitely apply to business blogs. The problem may be general design flaws, outdated content, irrelevant content, "boring" content, etc., etc. etc.

Now that I'm paying attention to the bounce rate on Compendium's own blogs, it's also interesting to see how various search terms impact bounce rate and read time. For example, "business blogging software" is one of our best terms, with people spending an average of 3 minutes on our blogs, and very few of them are bouncing off right away. The bounce rate for "business blogging software" on our website is higher, and the read time isn't as long.

What this tells me is that it would do Compendium a lot of good to be the #1 result in Google for this term. Clearly, it's attracting the right kind of attention, and higher search engine placement would likely mean more visibility. When it comes to your blogging program, as a first step, I recommend taking a look at your website stats, because then you'll have something to benchmark against. Thanks to Slingshot for getting me in the "bounce" frame of mind.