Are Pages that have High Traffic and High Bounce Rates helpful?
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I work as a marketing director for a small law firm. I had some basic SEO experience prior to joining the firm but I'm still building my knowledge base. I'm working to take over where the previous web developer left off and improve the site. The previous firm had developed pages for the law firm featuring yearly car crash statistics, statistics for bike crashes, etc. These pages get a good amount of hits but people quickly jump off the pages, and most are not even located in a region where they could potentially become a client.
I feel like they added the pages to show the client that there was an increase in search traffic. However, 100% of the traffic bounces quickly after viewing the statistics pages. Does a page that has a decent amount of hits, but doesn't lead to conversions and has a nearly 100% bounce rate worth keeping around?
My thought is, I would like to remove these pages that do not actually attract potential clients and reduce the overall bounce rate of the site. I don't want to take actions to remove the page without throwing this question out to more experienced people.
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Definitely agree with that.. and whatever you do, don't delete it!
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Removing the pages is an option, but I would recommend adding a CTA, breaking up text for better readability, adding headers, or changing the pages' design to decrease the bounce rate. Since theses pages are getting alot of traffic, I would assume they are ranking high on Google for some search terms on a national level. Rand did a WhiteBoard Friday that somewhat covers this topic at https://moz.com/blog/landing-page-seo-conversion-or-both-whiteboard-friday. Also HubSpot, another leader in inbound marketing had a great infographic about this as well that you can check out at https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/decrease-website-bounce-rate-infographic.
Having a page like what you are describing is also a great opportunity to get some potential backlinks from people in the industry maybe using it as a resource. I would try to improve the page to take more advantage of the traffic, instead of deleting it. Hope this helps and best of success!
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