How do bounce rates affect SEO?
How do bounce rates affect your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts? There are numerous misconceptions surrounding this topic with many websites optimising for lower bounce rates to improve ranking, yet lower bounce rates do not directly translate to a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Bounce rates are the percentage of single engagement visits to your website. This is the number of website visitors that leave without viewing other pages of the site or engaging with your page in a meaningful way. Digital marketers use this measurement to identify whether the web page offered to the visitor is what they were looking for or not.
Bounce rates do not measure how long the person spends on a web page. This means you can have a high quality and engaging web page with a high bounce rate, as bounce rates do not measure how long the visitor stayed on your website.
This means:
It is easy to see that Google does not use the bounce rate shown to you on Google Analytics as a ranking factor. The reasons include:
Now that you have a better understanding of bounce rates, you need to know how it relates to your SEO efforts. It doesn't matter if Google tracks bounce rates and changes your ranking as a result, what does matter is how bounce rates will affect SEO factors that Google sees as important ranking factors.
Analysing search intent is important to your SEO strategy, determining how much organic traffic results in long clicks. If your website has a high bounce rate, but users also have a long dwell time, your page is likely to have a good long click performance. When you take dwell time into consideration, you avoid unnecessarily optimising for bounce rate.
Bounce rates are often seen as a weakness in other SEO factors. Some SEO problems you want to check for when you have a high bounce rate includes:
When you address these issues, you can fix your bounce rate.
While bounce rates do not directly impact your ranking in SERPs, it is something you want to understand and focus on improving. High bounce rates, if calculated correctly, are often a sign of a deeper problem such as poor targeting or user experience problems. User experience (UX) and poor targeting are important issues you should be focusing on.
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