My website analytics tell me an interesting story. In the last month I’ve had:

• 271 unique visitors
• 568 page views
• 2:07 minute average time on page

Those are pretty decent stats for me, considering I’m a small business owner, running a freelance copywriting business. The one stat that most people will probably ask me about is my bounce rate. And I’ll tell you that it’s over 70% for that same time period.

Eek, that sounds like a bad number, right? I mean, that means that 70% of the people who arrive at my site don’t spend a ton of time on there, and leave after only looking at one page.

A bounce rate that high on a purely sales-driven site or pure blogging site would be an issue. However in my case, I’m not as worried.

Why?

Because the one page they’re looking at is a blog post.

I’ve spent a lot of time marketing through my blog posts, so it’s only natural that a reader would come through, read only that post, and then leave. After all, a lot of my visitors tend to be other marketers and writers, so I don’t necessarily need them to visit the rest of my site, right? They’re not my target audience.

So what about the other 30%?

Those numbers tell me a different story.

• 10% look at 3+ pages on my site
• 12% look at 2+ pages on my site
• 16% look at my Why Me page
• 26% look at my Services page
• 12% clicked through from a link I tweeted
• 14% of the page views lasted between 3-5 minutes
• 20% of the page views lasted between 10-30 minutes
• 86% of the visitors to my site were new, however returning visitors spent longer on my site than new visitors (an average of 3.5 minutes vs 1.5 minutes)

I highlighted these stats in particular because they’re important from an SEO perspective. Since the majority of your search engine traffic is going to come from Google, let’s look at what it analyzes when it calculates SERs: time on page, bounce rate, number of visitors, and number of returning visits.

Why Are These Stats Important?

That’s pretty simple, if you use some common sense. If more people visit a site, and spend more time on it, that probably means that a lot of people trust the site and the information on it, right? Same thing for Google.

Why That’s Important for B2B Companies

For B2B companies, bounce rate isn’t as important as these other stats because all it takes is one prospect to convert into a lead to be worthwhile. You’re dealing with much bigger sales contracts (in terms of sheer size and probably price) and longer sales cycles. So getting them to switch from prospect to lead to customer will take more of an investment on your side.

Are You Ready to Ignore Your Website Bounce Stats?

Just do it. Just ignore your bounce rate, and focus on the pages they are visiting. I’ll bet you’ll notice a difference in your conversions if you do.