SEO – Understanding the bounce rate

Bounce rate is the term used to identify how long a visitor stays on your website. When it comes to SEO and website traffic monitoring, do you think you understand the bounce rate on your website? What exactly does this mean when it comes down to effectively managing traffic to your website?

A bounce rate is something that every company should know if they wanted to find out how intriguing their website is. The name of this term is accurate to the description to action. What the “bounce” refers to when an individual is visiting a website and after just leaves the website without interacting with the page any longer. This means that they click on absolutely nothing, items like the menu bar or “read more” link. The “bounce” of the customer leaving the website is what refers to bounce rate, as the amount of people coming and leaving is the “rate” part of the term. Therefore, the bounce rate of your website tells you the amount (percentage) of how many individuals bounce off your page. This is the best way to analyze the traffic flow of your website and keeping your website relevant.

First of all, it’s essential to distinguish between bounce rate and exit rate. Put simply, this applies when only one page in the site is visited, while the exit rate applies to the last page visited regardless of how many other pages were visited in the same session.

There are several acceptable bounce rates based on the type of website your business would have, these being:

• 40-60% – Content websites
• 30-50% – Lead generation sites
• 70-98% – Blogs
• 20-40% – Retail sites
• 10-30% – Service sites
• 70-90% – Landing pages

Ref: Google Analytics benchmarks

Of course, you will need to identify the type of website your business has, and ensure that it is in line with these numbers.

Remember bounce rate is a percentage, so if one visitor lands on what you consider to be an internal page and leaves immediately, you will get a 100% bounce rate. Ideally, lower bounce rates will need to be your target, of course, dependent on the audience your website is targeting.

How to Determine a Bounce Rate

The most common way to determine the bounce rate is through Google Analytics. When a user doesn’t respond to the website, Google Analytics doesn’t receive any kind of prompt that shows interest. By this strategy, it is easier to tell if the content or the quality of your page is actually worthy enough reading or not valid enough for the reader’s time. Sometimes no further interaction of your webpage could also mean the content of the page is not meant for the individual’s purpose either. 

According to yoast.com, Google calculates the bounce rate by taking a single page session divided by all the sessions, in other words, the percentage of all sessions on your site where users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. To make it even simpler, it collects all the sessions when an individual visited only one page and divides it by all the total sessions. In general, the lower the bounce rate is, the better it is for you as the website creator. Having a “higher” bounce rate means necessarily that there are factors that contribute to it.

What can you do to salvage a bad bounce rate?

There are a number of things that you or your website developer and/or SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a person can do. After analyzing the bounce rate and determining the pages that need to be improved, you will need to ask yourself some questions, these being:

• it’s the wrong site or content;
• it takes too long to load;
• Call to action is not available or clear;
• the navigation is not intuitive;
• the site is not responsive;
• it’s visually unappealing;
• it feels untrustworthy;
• the services are not clear enough;
• they just don’t like it;
• and the list goes on…

The most important thing to remember when checking your bounce rate is context. Check it against the benchmarks, and evaluate what a good rate for each particular page should be. If it is too low, check for a script or set up errors in your analytics; if it’s too high, try some of the above guidelines.

Remember, bounce rate should be understood in order to retain traffic, and gain conversions.

It’s best to make one change at a time, and then check if it has made a difference. Bounce rate can be your friend if you learn to use it properly.

Above all, remember that this is one of many tools used in retaining visitors on your website.. Having a healthy bounce rate will not magically increase sales or sign-ups but will help you increase the time someone stays on your site, and maybe, maybe generate a sale.

We have been providing effective website ranking, SEO and improvements to bounce rates since 2008. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Interpreting Bounce Rates

Depending on the type of content created, a high bounce rate could either be good or bad for your webpage. For example with some pages that created that are meant to purely inform readers, it would make sense that they wouldn’t get a large amount of feedback or prompts from their readers. It is comprehended that after getting the information they came looking for, they exit immediately after getting it from the article. Although it would be nice if they clicked on other articles written on that website or even subscribed to the page, that is when Google Analytics would be notified of the prompt of their click, it usually occurs on a rare occasion. But in most cases, if they are looking for statistics or things like an address of a place, then it’s not surprising that readers exit out of the window as soon as they got ahold of the information they were in the search of. 

Meanwhile, with other pages that are meant to engage with readers, the fact of getting a high bounce rate isn’t good news. For example, some pages have one major goal when they want consumers to view their page, and it is to gain subscribers. They want their viewers to read their content and come back wanting to read more. In instances like these, they may have to change the way they advertise their article/page. There are simple solutions for example like adding a pop-up button on the page that says “subscribe” where users are then aware of the option of subscribing. Other pages could be like ones that want to sell products and end up getting no clicks on their website. Another large reason why there could be a low bounce rate for subscribing pages is that of click-baiting. This refers to the term of having information in your article title that ends up not actually being in your article. When this occurs, readers actually might even get agitated, not only leaving the website. It shouldn’t be expected to have a low bounce rate when the website doesn’t include actual information that it is titled to be. 

Bounce rates are better interpreted as metrics. That way, it’s better to see the numbers that come with bounce rates and comparing scores. According to gorocketfuel.com, the numbers ranging from 26-40 percent is excellent for a website. It even sometimes seems impossible for firms to get their numbers down to the range of this. 41-51% is about halfway, and this is average. 56-70 percent is pretty much disappointing for anything that is meant to be engaging such as blogs, newsletters, the news. In the picture shown below, it is observed that the most common segment was between 35-40 percent.

What Makes a High Bounce Rate?

As mentioned above, generally the lower the bounce rate is, the better the content there is on the webpage. Depending on the type of webpage you have created, having a high bounce is something that you would want to avoid and although there are many different reasons, these three factors especially have a large impact on the numbers: 

1. The overall quality of your page is low. This could mean there’s nothing engaging on the website and users feel like they just see a block of text. The suggested solution to this would be creating the overall layout more intriguing.
2. The crowd that went on your page don’t match the same purpose. It is normal for no engagement if they do not find the information that they were looking for.
3. Consumers that visited the page easily found the information that they were looking for and needed no further information 

Advantages of Google Analytics

One big advantage you can have with bounce rates and utilizing Google Analytics is seeing the segments that they provide. This way, for websites trying to target specific demographics, ages, genders, and browsers, it’s helpful. They can even check for new visitors or returning ones as well. Below, information is shown of the ages once you go to the audience, then demographics, then age on Google Analytics. It even provides the duration of the user on the webpage. 

The Contribution of SEO

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doesn’t factor largely with bounce rates but more so of the overall views of the page, its still an essential key. SEO is when the top pages that come up through results are because of advertisement or professional marketing strategies. There have been many questions about whether SEO has played a hand in the bounce rate that is calculated through Google Analytics. Thankfully, they have confirmed that Google does not use the algorithm for the analytics. But the only concern here is that when consumers”bounce” to your website, to make sure they do not bounce back to the search results that they came from. The important thing is having factors that make visitors want to stay on your website.

Keeping a low bounce rate is hard for some pages, and through the right strategic details, this can be changed. Here are the top ways to reduce the overall amount of bounce rate: 

1. There has to be a clear call to action. If the consumers come to a page where the call to action is hidden or they find it has nothing to do with the content, they will just bounce.
2. Give them a purpose to navigate throughout the page. Whether the information they were looking for is solved or not solved, there is more than likely a chance that they would just leave. An example of this would be instead of displaying information like the number of a company on the homepage, it would be better to create an about us page.
3. Make the landing page pretty. The landing page is basically the homepage, and if the first expression is the most important, that is the biggest reason to make the landing page attractive. Individuals actually judge the reliability of the content of a page based on the appearance of it.

Overall Conclusion of Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are used to mainly analyze the marketing efforts that websites create and put out. The most common way that bounce rates are determined is through Google Analytics. Bounce rates are beneficial in helping the creators of the web page change and innovate their website so they are able to determine what makes users want and not want to engage. Since it is common to want users to engage with your web page and a high ate isn’t bad, it is more efficient when a lower bounce rate is proven for a web page.