Either Way, You Should Pay Attention to it
Bounce rates are a important metric that is more of a factor as SEOs work with the ever-changing world of SERPs, which some are predicting to be become much more personalized over the coming year. SEO Bruce Clay notes that going forward, SEOs are going to have to look at analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc., and ask themselves questions like did I get the conversion I was after? Which is something that should be done regardless.
The bounce rate must be evaluated by associating it with the time on site: if the bounce rate is low but visitors spend also few time on the site, that would mean that the visitors do not find what they are searching and go quickly from one page to the other. The longer the time on site is and the more a low bounce rate has a positive meaning.
The percentage of new visits is in connection with the percentage of visits brought by search engines: those bring new visitors while referrals and bookmarks bring more often same ones. It is also in connection with the expansion of the visits. Its interpretation depends on many external factors.
A post today from SEO Black Hat seems to indicate that bounce rates are already a significant factor in ranking. They provide the following screenshots showing Google Analytics data for a “white hat” site (click any of them to view the larger versions at SEO Black Hat:
Hmm. See any correlation there? “This is exactly the pattern you would expect from a program designed to flush out terms with higher bounce rates and test them across other sties,” writes the post’s author QuadsZilla. “Moreover, this isn’t the first time I’ve recognized this pattern, it happens every 2-3 months on average.” Quadzilla then notes the absence of any such information in Google’s SEO starter guide, but points to a few cluews in the Analytics support page.
So, maybe bounce rates are something that you should be worried about. In all honesty, you should’ve been worried about them anyway, if nothing more than to keep people at your site. Nevermind if they got there through Google.
To reduce the rate and thus to keep visitors on the site, the following factors are essential:
- Design.
A pleasant presentation encourages to visit the site. - Loading time.
On a site whose pages take a long time to appear one is incited neither to continue, nor to return. The use of a CMS must be associated to a quality hosting that has reactive databases. - Interest.
When text is interesting, in good English and without spelling mistakes, users will want to see what the author has written again. - Size of the contents.
Short articles incite to read other pages (but complete texts are more lucky to obtain backlinks and thus new visits). A low rate obtained by shorter articles is only useful if one wants show statistics to others. - External links and ads.
If the visitor clicks on a link or a ad, it is lost for the site (temporarily). See the Adsense tutorial about this subject.
Links on external sites are essential and a factor of better position in results of search engines, just avoid those which are not relevant. - Adapting keywords.
The main factor of bounce is the fact that a page on which one arrives does not correspond to what one search on the engine. It is so necessary to select keywords which are more appropriate for the contents. See the article a site of quality for how to put keywords in a web page.