What is bounce rate?
A bounce rate is the number of visitors that source a website through a search engine (paid and non paid) but leave without navigating to any other webpage and “bounce” back to the search engine to find another resource. These statistics can be used to quantify the quality of the specific landing pages, which is typically the homepage, which a web user arrives at.
How can this affect SEO?
A high bounce rate will affect search engine position because it implies to the search engines that the website is not relevant to the searched terms that people are locating the website through and will consequently penalise the website which will ultimately be reflected in its search engine position. Conversely if your website is of a high quality, looks good and relevant to the target market, is easy to navigate and has targeted the right keywords then there should be no need for a person to bounce away from the website. Instead they should be engrossed by the content of the website, and navigate around further. This good user experience will then be noted by the search engines as their aim is to provide their users with the best quality results.
What is a low and high bounce rate?
There is no definitive answer as to what a high and low bounce rate is as it is dependent on factors such as the nature of the website and how many webpages it contains. Obviously 0% is the ideal figure but not realistic. As a general rule of thumb anything below 30% is low, whilst anything above 50% is considered to be high and therefore should be addressed in order to ascertain the reason for the high bounce rate.
How can I monitor the bounce rate?
The bounce rate of a website can be monitored using tools such as Google Analytics which can tell its users which individual webpages have the highest bounce rates over a period of time.
How can a high bounce rate be lowered?
The lower the bounce rate a website has, the greater the chance it has of achieving its objectives, whether that is making a sale or provide information on a subject matter. Four of the most common reasons for a website having a high bounce rate are:
- targeting the wrong keywords
- poorly written or not enough content
- poorly designed web pages
- poor website structure which is difficult to navigate around.
Therefore if a website does have a high bounce rate these are the four areas to address first of all and coupled with user experience testing a website owner can identify the cause of the problem.
