What is a bounce rate?
The term “bounce rate” is used when referring to the number of people who enter your site (not necessarily through your home page) and immediately leave your site without clicking on any other link on your web site.
A bounce rate as defined by Google is the percentage of single-page visits.
Why is my bounce rate important to my website?
Different websites have different ways of measuring success. For example, an e-commerce website measures success in their amount of sales, a lead generation site measures success in the amount of forms they get filled out, and a content site measures success by the number of people who stay on their site and read their Content. Although their goals are different, they all have one common area they should focus on and that’s their bounce rate.
If someone visits your site and quickly leaves, it should alert you that you’re not doing a good enough job selling the value of your web site.
If you have a significantly high bounce rate, say 85%, you should find the pages that have the highest bounce rate and find ways to reduce that number.
How can I improve my bounce rate?
The first thing to consider is the look of your website. You have 2.8 seconds to capture someone's attention when they land on your webpage. Within that time, you’ve got to convince your visitor that your site is relevant and credible.
Ask yourself; is my site appealing? Does it look easy to navigate through? Does my content speak appropriately to the consumer I am trying to reach? To achieve a low bounce rate, you should be able to answer yes to all of these.
Another cause to consider is your keywords. Find out what search terms people are using to find your site. Check to make sure that your content and search terms are well-matched. Otherwise you will have a high bounce rate due to visitors not finding what they expected on your pages.
How Your Bounce Rate Could be Effectiing Your Ranking
Before we go on, let us begin by saying the following is what any SEO expert can perceive from Google’s viewpoint. It is in fact a theory and not information provided by Google.
There has been talk of the SEO industry getting some inside information that Google could be using bounce rates to determine top page rankings (especially on top pages of Google search results ranging from pages 1-10).
The reason behind this theory is that Google is warding off black hat SEO techniques that use unrelated keywords to artificially optimize a site. Such websites have a high bounce rate.
It is believed Google will analyze bounce rates carefully and push a website with a higher bounce rate from page 1 to page 3 or 4 for the duration of 10-15 days.
Google is trying its best to effectively penalize sites that practice black hat SEO without affecting those who abide proper SEO techniques. It is thought that this practice will promote genuine websites with genuine content.
There are many thoughts and ideas when it comes to bounce rates and how to draw visitors further into your site. Making sure your website is easy to navigate, has quality back links, relevant keywords and content, and offers good products/services will help ensure a low bounce rate, therefore having little effect on your ranking.
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