Originally Posted by AaronM

I have a mainstream site that is about 6 years old. The bounce rate has consistently been 70-80%. The site is very well SEO'd and the content is 100% exclusive. The high bounce rate has always bothered me.

Although I haven't added any new content to the site since early 2013, about 6 months back I completely overhauled the site design. User feedback had suggested I take it from a dark background with light text to a light background with dark text so I did that at the same time. I also removed some "features" and added some new ones and made it more mobile friendly. The bounce rate immediately dropped DRASTICALLY.

The majority of my traffic is from search engines.

In May of 2014 this site had:

Sessions: 278,256
Users: 245,334
Page Views: 473,401
Pages/Session: 1.7
New Sessions: 84.14%
Bounce Rate: 76.36%

In January 2015 this site had:

Sessions: 221,867
Users: 200,539
Page Views: 609,367
Pages/Session: 2.75
New Sessions: 88.17%
Bounce Rate: 0.36%


*Your milage may vary.