Law Firm Bounce Rate and Visitor Engagement

Law Firm Bounce Rate and Visitor Engagement

Law firm website bounce rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who view only one page of a law firm’s website before leaving.

It’s important to know what a law firm’s website bounce rate is, as this will provide an indication as to how engaging the website is, and correspondingly, whether website visitors are likely to become clients.

The main purpose of your firm’s website is to draw reader interest, convey information, and turn visitors into clients.  Whether website visitors become clients often depends upon the branding and how well the website resonates with them around their legal needs.

When visiting a new website, visitors typically spend about 10 seconds evaluating the website.  In this short time period, they decide whether to take the time to further explore the site, or to click the “back” button and return to the search results.  Thus you have a very short window of opportunity to make a positive impression on potential clients.

How to Tell if Visitors are Engaged in Your Website

The answer can be found in looking at your web analytics (if you aren’t already using web analytics, consider implementing Google Analytics – which is free – or another analytics program immediately). Among the analytics information and charts is a statistic called bounce rate.  This percentage is the percentage of people who leave your website after seeing only one web page.

The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of visitors who leave after seeing only one page by the total number of website visits. So, if your website has a bounce rate of 75%, in about ¾ of the visits to your website users left after only seeing one page; the other 25% stay on the site and view more pages.

Making Sense of the Statistics

A bounce rate of 50% or less is usually very good. A bounce rate of 50%-70% is often an indication of that improvement should be made to make the website better resonate with users. A bounce rate of over 70% is usually a signal that something needs to be changed, as likely the website is not resonating with prospective clients.

These percentages assume that your site is receiving a fair amount of website traffic; if the majority of the website traffic is coming only from your firm’s attorneys and staff, the percentages will not be meaningful.

You can learn even more about how users are acting on your firm’s website by looking at the bounce rate along with other web statistics.  If your analytics  also happen to tell you that visitors are spending a very short amount of time on the website (say, less than 10 seconds on average), this is a further indication that your website needs help.

Taking Action to Improve Your Bounce Rate

Are visitors “bouncing away” from your website en masse? If so, it’s likely due to your site’s branding, messages, content, and navigation structure.

Contact us today so that we can help change this course and make your website more effective in developing clients.