How Bounce Rate Affects Your SEO

Bounce rate is one of the crucial metrics in digital marketing that all website owners strive to reduce. However, this is not always as important as they say. Since most site owners only have access to Google Analytics, there is nothing to compare. Is my failure rate too high or low? We will answer the most frequent questions and share 5 tips on how to reduce your site’s bounce rate and improve your technical SEO checklist. Let’s begin!

What Is the Bounce Rate in Google Analytics?

Some people think that rejection covers just a one-page visit. In fact, according to Google’s explanation, a bounce is a one-hit session. Therefore, the rejection rate is the percentage of sessions during which your users made only one hit (interaction) with the site.

Pageviews are hits; most events are hits as well. So, the true definition of bounce is a single visit. This is equal to visiting one page. So, how is the failure rate defined? This is the number of visits per page to the total number of visits ratio. Very simple.

Controversial Issue of Bounce Rate Importance

Bounce rate does not always matter, and this is a subject of discussion:

• Why are failure rates important?
• When do they matter in digital marketing?
• When should you not worry about them at all?

The importance of the bounce rate depends on the type of page and the traffic source. In this regard, we can come up with two possible scenarios:

1) When bounce rates are critical

If your web page has commercial intent aka sales page, e-commerce product page, etc., calculating the healthy bounce rate is crucial. You pay real money for traffic: PPC, promotion in social networks, etc. When traffic is expensive, the bounce rate is a measure of waste.

When visitors land on product pages, they only see one product. They may not like the price if they shop for the price. The fact that there aren’t enough reviews on the site may alarm them, or they may not trust the company at all. On category pages, visitors see multiple products. Thus, you have more opportunities to convince them to stay.

2) When bounce rates don’t matter

A page may contain information, which a visitor searches for. The traffic source is free: SEO or social media. But when traffic is free, the failure rate is simply the percentage of people who don’t need anything else. People who are not motivated to click again. They needed the information, they got it and left. What else did you expect?

Still, it does not mean that the site owner does not need to lower the bounce rate.

What’s the Ideal Bounce Rate?

• For landing pages, the main traffic sources are PPC and social media ads. The importance of failures is maximum. The ideal percentage is up to 40%.
• For homepages and service pages, organic search is the most important traffic source. The importance of bounces is medium. The ideal percentage is less than 60%.
• Finally, for blog posts, traffic comes from organic search and social media promotion. The importance of failures, in this case, is minimal. A good indicator is up to 80%.

Site owners need to remember one nuance. For media companies with ad models, your goal of lowering bounce rates is directly against your advertisers’ goals. They want your visitors to go straight to their sites. This is why they pay you.

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate?

Bounce rates are important. Regardless of the amount, type of the page, traffic source, it is always good to decrease it. So let’s consider a list of five ways to improve the user experience with your website:

1. Use headlines with the highest click-through rates

To reduce your article bounce rate, add the most clickable headline as your calls to action. If you’re promoting content on social media, you need to understand what headlines are interesting to the public.

2. Create texts for fast reading

If the top of your post is a plain text with huge paragraphs, then it’s not surprising that visitors leave it immediately. But if you greet them on the page with a friendly image and a few short, easy-to-scan paragraphs, they are likely to stay.

3. Make your content more visual

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have such high engagement rates and low bounce rates because they are filled with visual content. Adding images to the articles, especially at the top, can grab the attention of your visitors. The longer people stay on the page, the more likely they are to see and click on the link.

4. Remove post dates from your blog

This recommendation is causing some debate. Readers will tell you that they prefer to know the date of the article. This is especially important for materials that relate to law, business, and other very active, dynamic areas. But any indication that a post is out of date will reduce the likelihood that visitors will stay, engage, read, and click on.

5. Increase traffic from sources with low bounce rate

Any increase in traffic from sources with a low bounce rate will lower the overall site bounce rate. It is obvious. If visitors come from organic search, they are more likely to promote your content using SEO tools. Follow these simple tips and your conversions will be high!

Anything to add? Share your ideas with us in the comments.

We hope you enjoyed this promoted post as much as we did!