“They came, they saw, and they left.” That is what the bounce rate is, in a nutshell. The relevance of the bounce rate is an ongoing debate in the world of SEO that does not have a clear winner. Is it good to have a low bounce rate? Do I need to increase my bounce rate? How do I measure my bounce rate? These are questions; even the most qualified SEO Company will find it difficult to answer. But let’s give it a go.
“They came, they saw, and they left.” That is what the bounce rate is, in a nutshell. The relevance of the bounce rate is an ongoing debate in the world of SEO that does not have a clear winner. Is it good to have a low bounce rate? Do I need to increase my bounce rate? How do I measure my bounce rate? These are questions; even the most qualified SEO Company will find it difficult to answer. But let’s give it a go.
What Exactly is ‘Bounce Rate?’
In order to get over the technicalities of the terms first, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who trigger only a single request. Basically, what that means is that a user visits your website from the search engine results page and then leaves the site without clicking on any other link or internal page.
Google Analytics is the main tool that allows you to keep track of the bounce rate of your website. The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the single-page sessions by all the sessions. The division will give you the percentage of all sessions in which a visitor viewed only a single page. The most important factor about the bounce rate is that it indicates whether a user found what they were looking for on your website or not.
Does The Bounce Rate Impact Your Ranking?
The short answer…? No. Well…not exactly. Ok, it’s complicated. The secrecy around the Google algorithm has led to a lot of conjecture about the importance of the bounce rate and its impact on SEO. Even though Google has indicated that the bounce rate does not play a direct role in website ranking, the jury is still out on what this implies.
The way to understand the relationship between the bounce rate and SEO is to factor in the dwell time. Dwell time is quite simply the time a user spends viewing a document or web page after having clicked on it. Now, if you factor in the bounce rate and the dwell time, then you will see a clear relation between the two, and the impact it has on SEO.
For example, a high-dwell time with a low-bounce rate clearly indicates that the users spend a lot of time on your page and are happy with what they see. On the other hand, a high bounce rate with a low dwell time is a clear indicator that your visitors do not find what they want when they click on your site. Both of these factors will obviously affect SEO and web rankings in the long run. You can consult an best SEO company to compare your dwell time and bounce rate to check if you are on the right track.
Is the Bounce Rate Good or Bad?
Well, this is where it gets a little tricky. On the face of it, you may think that having visitors come to your site and leave without any further engagement is not a good thing. However, it could also mean that the visitor found what they were looking for on the first page itself, and there was no need to “dwell.” A high bounce rate can be a good thing if the purpose of the webpage is to give the visitor the relevant content as quickly as possible. Informational websites, like Wikipedia, tend to have a high bounce rate simply because the user finds what they need and then moves on. In that case, a high bounce rate is a good thing.
On the other hand, for an eCommerce website, a high bounce rate is not good at all. The goal of an eCommerce website is to give users an array of options in the hope that they will scan through all the products and services and then make a choice. However, if the user exits your site without clicking on any of the products, then you will be missing out on potential conversions. In this case, a high bounce rate is bad because it can be compared to a customer walking into a store and then simply walking out because he or she did not like anything. Imagine how frustrating it must be if that were to happen all day long. Once you set the goal for the website, you can contact a professional SEO company to find out how to optimize your content so that you get
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