So, you’ve heard of Bounce Rate, but have no idea what it is or what it does? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there at one time or another. When I used to supply my customers with their analytics data reports every week, many of them would ask, “What is Bounce Rate and higher is better, right?” Absolutely Incorrect! The lower the bounce rate, the more your readers are enjoying your site.
One thing to keep in mind is, most internet surfers are into getting the quickest information possible in the shortest amount of time. Remember the days of Dial-Up? You used to have to wait several seconds, if not a minute for each page to load… Imagine having to revert to that! No, now we’ve got speeds upward or exceeding 100Mbps (Mega bits per second). That’s lightyears ahead of the dial up days.
Okay, but What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is when someone visits your site and decides that the content they’ve found isn’t relevant to what they were looking for. Either your page was too slow to load, your title and description didn’t match the content or there were other problems (e.g. 404 Errors, etc…). In other words, the visitor didn’t navigate through your site any further and left after only visiting the first landing page.
A good rule of thumb is, if you have a bounce rate less than 40%, you’re doing okay. If you’re upwards of 70-80% or even higher… You definitely have a problem, and you should be figuring out where it is.
Think about how many times you’ve searched the internet for just about anything… You click through the first several pages that appear for your search, only if the title and description appear relevant to what you were looking for. Once you arrive on the page that you had searched for, you’ll browse through relatively quick until you either find what you were looking for or decide to quickly hit the back button and move on to the next. This is Bounce Rate.
You are probably affecting the bounce rate of thousands of websites a month (depending on your internet usage). Everytime you jump into and out of these websites that weren’t what you were looking for, Google recognizes that and will eventually move these down the rankings as more people follow the same action that you have.
To sum this up, make sure that the keywords which are driving the traffic to your website/blog/etc… are highly relevant to your content. To improve your bounce rate and decrease the percentage of people that leave your site, try adding links inside of your content to similar articles or pages that your visitors might find helpful. You’ll find that I’ve done this throughout my blog. Not only is it great to keep visitors staying on your site, but it also helps to potentially increase your advertising revenue.