According to Google, it is using bounce rate as a criteria to determine your website ranking in Google search result pages. Many people may not understand what is bounce rate and how to achieve better Google ranking by lowering bounce rate of your websites.
What Is Bounce Rate?
There are 2 definitions of the bounce rate.
The bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website.
Another definition is:
The bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who stay on your website for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).
Google’s Definition Of The Bounce Rate
Google says:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
Is Google Using Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?
By just looking at the Google’s definition, we know that Google treats bounce rate as a serious and important factor during the determination of a website ranking. Google is not able to collect such information if you does not use Google Analytics as a website tracking and analysis tool and your visitors does not use any of the toolbar developed by Google.
But this is not the case in the real world. Since Google Analytics is free and most powerful analytics tool, many website owner has installed the scripts to help them improve their website. Many visitors have installed Google toolbar which bundled with quite a number of software. As a result, Google has the ability to collect bounce rate information from your website readers.
If your web pages have a high bounce rate for a search keyword or phrase, Google might be lowering the rankings of your web pages for that particular search term. I do not mean that you can increase Google ranking just by focusing on lowering bounce rate. There are quite a number of SEO stuffs you need to consider in order to improve the ranking. On average, the bounce rate of around 50% is considered as normal.
How Can You Lower The Bounce Rate Of Web Pages?
The bounce rate is a value helping you to measure the quality of your website traffic. By analyzing the bounce rate, you are able to to fix the problem of your web pages and ultimately increase your website traffic.
A high bounce rate is usually a sign of low quality website traffic or low quality web pages. It means that the web page doesn’t offer what the visitor is looking for or you simply bring in those traffic which do not really searching for information and they purely jumping from website to website.
As I always like to say, content is king. Without quality content, readers are not interested in your website or web pages. People might be forget that quality content forms the basic of your website. Sometimes with just minor modifications of the design of your website, it will increase the desire of your visitors to read your content. There is no fix rule, what you can do is to do some experiements. Different type of visitors behave differently.
Conclusion
Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages will get you more traffic from search engines and you will get a higher conversion rate (sales or subscription). Bounce rate should be included as part of your SEO strategy as Google consider this as a element in determining ranking of your web pages in search engine resullt pages.
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This is something new for me. I never thought like this. I was a little worried about my bounce rates but never though if could affect my rankings.
Thanks for the infos. I will be more attentive to bounce rates next time.
This is good stuff to learn. It makes a lot of sense but never realized bounce rate could affect website ranking. Thank you for your information.
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