Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bounce Rate? 7 Tips

If you're seeing bounce rates for your website that are just too high, you're not alone. Many legal marketers complain that their bounce rate can be as high as 50 percent with some pay per click advertisements, and that's just too high. If you're seeing huge bounce rates for emails or website content, here are a few ways that you can change your content and your marketing to ensure that you're getting the lowest bounce rates possible for your law firm.
#1: Multimedia and Video Work!
If your law firm isn't getting the kind of conversion rates you want and you're seeing a high bounce rate, consider having some video that's easy to start on your front page. Don't have video that starts automatically—this can sometimes be loud and disruptive, causing people to close their browser window instead of continuing to look at your website. Instead, make it easy to start and use an interesting frame from the video as the one that people will see when it is ready to start.
Video can vastly increase conversions (by up to 600%, in some cases) and will make it so that your bounce rate goes down right away. Try having different video content at several different microsites so that you're sending people to video they'll be most interested in. You can then have text information about the same topic so that people have a choice in how to interact with your site.
#2: Mobile Accessibility
In 2013, it's thought that for the first time, mobile phone web traffic will actually use more bandwidth than traffic from desktop computers. This is an incredible change in how computing is being done, and it means that your law firm needs to make your website and your emails accessible from mobile phones. If you're not smartphone compatible with some aspect of your legal marketing, change it right away—you may be experiencing high bounce rates for your law firm website just because the site breaks when it's brought up on a smartphone browser.
Check to make sure that all browsers for smartphones are compatible with your websites and the emails you intend to send out. Less complicated can often be better for graphic design—having a lot of plugins required just makes it so that your website is broken for more visitors.
#3: Make Sure Your Website Loads Fast
Another aspect of making sure your bounce rate doesn't get too high is verifying that your website's loading time is not particularly long. Long loading times make people click the back button these days, especially since data transfer rates aren't always very high on mobile data plans. Keep your website simple enough to load quickly, and make sure your web host is giving you plenty of speed so that you're not losing clients just because of hosting problems. You should also get a hosting provider that is known for having minimal downtime—there's nothing worse than having your website go down just as you've started a new online marketing campaign.
#4: Check How Your Website Displays
Keep in mind that even on desktop and laptop computers, people may be using any of several browsers to access your website. The most common of these are Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer on PC systems, and Safari on Mac systems. You should always make sure that you've looked at compatibility on all of these browsers before you make a change to your website go live. Missing out on potential new clients because you didn't double check a browser is a sad and unnecessary way for your firm to lose money.
#5: Target Customers Properly
Okay, you're thinking—but my content is great! There's nothing wrong with the content, and people love it, but my ads are still giving me a huge bounce rate. If that happens, you need to work on your targeting. This is a common experience when people aren't thinking very hard about their ideal client before starting their legal marketing campaign. If you think about your ideal client, you'll know which demographics to target with your advertisements and how to keep them interested in your content.
You should also keep your targeting, for the most part, very local unless you have a practice that makes it possible for you to attract clients from a very wide geographic range. Most attorneys get their clients near their offices—consider microtargeting clients within just a few miles of your office, or a few blocks if you're in a big enough city and you often get clients from within the confines of your own neighborhood.
#6: Give Enough Information on Your Website
Some attorneys are stingy with information on their websites. Their thinking seems to be that if they don't give a lot of information out on their website, people will just phone to get the information they're lacking. This strategy just never works, because online, it's much easier to push the “back” button and just try again for a more informative and worthwhile website.
You draw clients in today not by teasing them with barely any information but by giving them all the information they need in an easy to understand way.
#7: Keep Your Site Looking Contemporary
We've all stumbled upon them: websites that are still alive today, but look like they should have been put to rest about a decade ago. You don't want your website to become a living fossil. Keep in mind that you need periodic revisions to your website, just to keep the graphic design elements looking fresh and contemporary.
This also means that you should be paying your website designer, not trying to use free templates. Trying to create your brand from free templates can be clumsy and time consuming—leave the design to people who specialize in it.