What is Bounce Rate.
Bounce rate refers to the time a visitor stays on a website before exiting and often its a very good measurement of the quality of content on your website. Modes of leaving vary from clicking on a link on the site, opening a new tab, typing in a new URL or simply clicking the back button on the browser. Receiving a lot of traffic from a Google search is a good thing. However, if all they do is read a few lines and leave because they didn’t find what they were looking for, it’s a strong indication that the content of your site does not match a visitors expectation pre website entry.
Over 80% Bounce. Is it Dangerous?
To high of a bounce rate may imply two things: Either your websites layout is poor and provides poor content, or your meta title and descriptions dont match your landing page content. Here is an example, lets say that a searcher is looking for a given cure online and happens to land on your site, your site has a vast amount of info on a cure for their particular aliment. Since your content matches the searchers original query the odds are good that the searcher will spend more time on your site and possibly navigate deeper into the site as apposed to moving on to another search query.
Another factor that influences bounce rate is your load time and the patience of the visitor. Pages that take to long to load are at risk of being bypassed. When having to wait to long for a page to load most users will close the tab and move on to the next page. Google records this as 100% bounce. The best thing you can do is to reduce your pages load time, while at the same time maintain high quality content.
Five ways to reduce bounce rate.
There are a number of ways in which you can considerably reduce bounce rate.
- Layout; Make your website layout more user friendly, from the colors, content, to the design.
- Reduce the amount time your site takes to load. This may be done by reducing the size and/or number of images or flash media present throughout the site.
- Reduce the number of external links on your site.
- Include internal links in your site so that visitors can access your other pages easily.
- Incorporate media that grabs a users attention and holds their interest.
Summary.
It may be hard to know how much Google considers your bounce rate because they dont 100% spell it out. But if you are dependent on Google traffic, it’s a wise idea to reduce your bounce rate.
Adam Chronister is co-founder of Enleaf, an award winning Web Design and Internet Marketing Firm. You can find him on Facebook Facebook and Twitter.
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