Poor Bounce Rate Affects Site Ranking
The all important question is;
does Google use bounce rate as a ranking factor, when deciding where to rank web pages in its index.?
The short answer to this question is YES, but what effect if any, does this have on your website in terms of website traffic & ranking. More importantly, what can you do to improve an already poor bounce rate.?
The Definition of Bounce Rate?
There are basically two definitions:
- The bounce rate of your website is the number of visitors who view only one page of your website or blog.
- The number of visitors who leave your site after a very small amount of time (usually only a few seconds).
In either case above, the bounce rate is an indication to Google & other search engines, of the quality of your website and it also helps you to find out which of your web pages require some form of improvement.
What The Google God Says About Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page), given as a percentage of total page visits. Bounce rate is a measure of page quality and a higher than average bounce rate would generally indicate that site entrance (landing) pages are not as relevant to your visitors search query as they should be.
Google’s definition clearly indicates that Google thinks web pages with a higher than average bounce rate, may not be relevant to your website visitors. If your web pages have a high bounce rate for a particular search term, Google may well lower the rankings of your web page for that particular search term.
Why Is Bounce Rate Important?
Google has the ability to collect all the data it requires about your website, through many different sources, including; Google Analytics, Google Toolbar and of course Google can also measure the time taken between repeat searches from the same IP address / user. In addition to this the possibility is also there for Google to measure the complete surfing behavior of users that use Google’s Chrome browser.
At the end of the day we should realise that Google is in the game of providing quality information to its users & therefore if the bounce rate of a web page indicates to Google that the results they are providing are not satisfactory, then it is a safe bet that Google is likely to take action on this.
Based on how many people carry out a repeat search for the same query, this could indicate to Google that your website is not as relevant as it should be for that particular search term & therefore Google is very likely to replace your web page with something that is seen as being more relevant to the search term.
Whilst bounce rate alone is not being used by Google in deciding the position of a web page in its index, when combined with other factors such as site speed, duplicate content etc, it could certainly have an effect on the ranking of your web pages.
Improve The Bounce Rate of Your Web Pages?
As we have seen, high bounce rate can be a sign of low quality web pages. In simple terms this means that, the information provided on your web page does not satisfy what the visitor is looking for, or the usability of your website is not good, such as slow page load or poor navigation.
The simple task of rewording an article can have a dramatic effect on your bounce rate, also paying close attention to page load times, image optimization & of course the all important keywords & phrases you chose to optimize your page for can yield good results. Don’t try to optimize your page for as many keywords as you can cram in, this only dilutes the relevance of each keyword, far better to choose two or three highly relevant keywords or phrases and optimize your page for these.
My own opinion is that choosing the most relevant keywords is the single most important factor when trying to reduce bounce rate, give your visitors exactly what they are searching for & they are far more likely to stay & read what you have to say. Something that can help greatly when using WordPress as a blogging platform, is the use of two plugins;
- Y.A.R.P.P. (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin), this is an excellent plugin & will provide a list of related articles at the bottom of your article. This means that providing the article that your visitor was reading was relevant to their search, then when they get to the end of the article, they are given a group (usually 5) links to other related topics.
- SEO Smart Links. This is another excellent plugin for helping to lower bounce rate. It scans through your articles looking for matching keywords & then based on the settings you have entered in the setup screen; it will automatically put links in the article text linking to the different articles.
One other factor you may wish to consider is the placing of adverts! As is often the case people place a large 300px X 250px ad block at the top left of an article & while this may well be the ideal place to put an advert in order to attract interest, if you have a poor bounce rate then this could make matters worse.
Just imagine your visitor arriving on your webpage, if the titles of the adverts sound more interesting than the title to your article, what do you think is likely to happen..? Of course you are giving your visitor the option to click off your page as soon as they have arrived, therefore if your website is experiencing a poor bounce rate, I would suggest moving your ads to the bottom of your article until such time as you see some improvement in your bounce rate.
I hope this has given you a little insight to the importance of bounce rate & also why it is equally as important to use a good analytics program to track your website performance. If you have any questions or opinions you would like to put forward, then please use the comment box below.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Feb 27 2011. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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