Semalt: Is Bounce Rate A Google Ranking Factor?
We've designed this article to help answer that question and enlighten you on more ways to reduce your bounce rate.
In the SEO world, the line between fact and fiction can get blurry real quick, and we get stuck trying to figure out what is real and what is a publicity stunt.
What Is Bounce Rate?
While we agree that bounce rates aren't a ranking factor, they still play an important role in assessing the SEO performance of any site. A site's bounce rate is important because it tells us whether or not people are engaging with the webpage's content.
Bounce rate is an internet SEO / marketing term used to analyze web traffic. It calculates and gives a percentage of visitors who enter and does nothing on the page before leaving. This also means that the visitor didn't bother checking other pages on the site.
We can choose to be broad or specif when calculating bounce rates. A bounce rate can be calculated for specific actions such as making a purchase, signing up, or clicking a link.
As marketers and SEO experts, understanding how bounce rates work has played an important role in our success as it gives some insight into what the target audience thinks about a web page. This knowledge can impact our overall marking strategy significantly and cause vital changes.
Is Bounce Rate A Ranking Factor?
Bounce rates can sometimes fuel unrealistic expectations. Relying on them alone isn't so healthy as they can get your hopes up without yielding any tangible result.
On June 12, 2020, Google's John Mueller gave Google's opinion on whether or not Bounce Rates were considered a ranking factor. Mueller said that Google doesn't use bounce rates in determining how websites are ranked in a webmaster hangout.
That makes a lot of sense because bounce rates are determined by several factors, and it can be greatly subjective based on the viewer.
Meuller said that it is a misconception to think or believe that Google analyzes the bounce rate when ranking a website.
In fact, there is historical data that supports that, indeed, Google doesn't factor in bounce rates when ranking.
On April 14, 2017, Gary Illyes, another employee of Google via Twitter, mentioned that the bounce rate isn't a good sign. Matt Cutts, 2008, of the Sphinn forum, also debunked rumors that bounce rates were used in the rankings.
Does Bounce Rate Affect Search Rankings?
No, or better still, not directly. Like social media, bounce rates don't directly affect organic rankings. However, it does affect other site metrics Google considers to be ranking factors. Things like slow page speed, poor web design, poor content, and poor mobile optimization can influence bounce rates, and these factors are ranking factors.
Combining time-on-page and bounce rate metrics can tell you whether or not you have a good user experience. When you experience low bounce rates with high-on-page time, we can confidently say that your page is in a good place.
Looking out for the time on the page is important because it indicates the quality of your content. It tells you how interesting or engaging your content is to your target audience.
To be honest, your time will be better spent improving the quality of your content rather than trying to reduce your bounce rate. After all, the one will eventually lead to the other.
Understanding the relevance of Bounce Rates
Bounce rates don't exactly give a clear picture of what's going on within the site. In a case where the success of your site depends on viewers visiting more than one page on your site, then having a high bounce rate is bad. However, there are situations where you have just one page on a site, like a blog. Or in cases where the page offers other forms of content besides text. In such cases, having a high bounce rate is considered normal.
The business itself also influences the bounce rate. Take an e-commerce site, for example. When last did you read the homepage of your favorite shopping website? Things like the homepage on e-сommerce websites experience high bounce rates because their target audiences are more interested in making a purchase, so they head directly to the products section.
What is a good bounce rate? A good bounce rate will fall somewhere between 20%-40%. But like we said, this doesn't apply to all websites. A website could have a bounce rate of 50%-60% and still be optimal.
How To Lower Bounce Rates
There are a number of ways you can lower the bounce rate of your site. The first thing you should do is identify factors that can negatively impact your bounce rate. Some of those factors include:
- Unnecessary pop-ups
- Slow page speed
- Poor usability
- Unnecessary plug-ins
- Low-quality content
- Poorly optimized title tags and meta descriptions
- Technical errors and blank pages
- Pages that aren't mobile-friendly
Here are ways to reduce your bounce rate:
Study pages with the highest exit volumes
You can find out which pages have the highest exit rates using Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Exit pages. This will show you at what pages do most visitors abandon your site. It also shows you whether traffic lands directly on these pages or navigate until they reach them.
With this knowledge, you can analyze these pages and understand why so many people feel the need to leave your website when they get to that point.
Understanding the cause means you can find a solution, and a solution would reduce your bounce rates.
Review In-Page Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can navigate to the "All pages" report for a breakdown of the bounce rate from individual pages, while the "Audience Overview" report gives you the overall bounce rate of your entire site.
We can also track what channel groupings have the most bounce rate using the "Channels" report. The "All Traffic" report then shows us the bounce rates for each source or medium.
Optimize For Mobile Devices
Mobile devices have become the new norm of internet traffic. With the growing number of users accessing the web with their mobile devices and Google prioritizing it as one of the essential ranking factors, reducing your bounce rate means optimizing for this kind of traffic.
It is possible that your site currently experiences a high bounce rate because your inbound traffic is from mobile devices, but your pages aren't optimized for that kind of traffic.
Websites that have been optimized for mobile devices wouldn't take long to load on smartphones, it easily resizes to fit the screen size, and it is very responsive. If your web pages fail to meet these conditions, it is possible that visitors leave in search of another source of what they want.
Have Clear CTA in Specific Places
Having strong optimized content on your page may not be enough to make your visitors take particular actions. When you create content, you need to have an objective, and you can tell viewers what kind of action you expect them to take. A well-placed CTA can prompt this action.
While you can have more than one CTA, it is important that you do not have too much. Remember how we said that bounce rate could also be the percentage of visitors who take certain actions on a page / site? Having too many CTAs can confuse or turn off your visitors, and you don't accomplish any of your goals.
When placing a CTA, consider the font, color, size, and copy choice. All these factors play a role in helping your CTA stand out and capture the attention of your audience.
Conclusion
One of the most amazing things about SEO is that every aspect of it affects the whole. Having good content, excellent design, and fast load speed will reduce your bounce rate, even if that wasn't the original plan. Likewise, having too high bounce rates may also indicate that there are certain poor or missing elements on your site.
So while your bounce rate isn't a ranking factor, it is still important to understand, and to improve it may indirectly lead to an improvement of your SEO performance.
Nevertheless, if you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.