In the context of internet marketing, Bounce Rate is used to define the occurrence of a visitor who visits your site, views a page and instantly leaves without showing any further interest. More precisely, bounce rate is the number of visits with only one-page view divided by the total number of visits to your site. It can also be referred to as the average number of visitors who are not showing interest to your site out of the total number of visitors to your site. It is clear that a high bounce rate implies negativity for SEO. Clearly, it is evident that people coming to your website did not find suitable content on your site to fulfill their needs.
If the bounce rate for your site is 80 percent it implies that 80% of the total number of visitors to your page only looked at one page and then left. The concerned page might be your homepage or any other internal page.
Therefore, search engines rank pages with lower bounce rates much higher since they seem to have more fulfilling content. Your website might even get devalued for that specific keyword or search term if it has a very high bounce rate! This is also in the best interest of the search engine itself in order to maintain or brighten its own reputation! The bounce rate of a website is the actual reflection of the judgment of the visitors regarding the content quality of your website. However, you can look at it from a positive space as well. It helps you to realize which of your web pages really need improvements in order to shine in the world of internet marketing!
Both good bounce rates and bad bounce rates impacts search engine optimization in different ways. Finally, the average time spent by each visitor on the page is taken into account. There might be a case where a particular website has a high bounce rate with a decent average time spent on page. This might indicate that visitors are spending their precious time to actually read the page thoroughly and the page may have provided what they were looking for.
Proper use of search engine optimization and keywords can play a big role in getting your site’s rank higher on the search engine list. Whether a high bounce rate is really bad depends on the type of webpage. There are many pages that only need viewers to see one page. These pages generally include those that are counting on visitors to click on ads or other platforms.
You always want quality visits for your site. The objective of most business-related SEO strategies is to gain potential customers who shall stay, look around, explore the various internal links, and finally decide to do business with the specific company. This is a quality visit and leads to lead conversions.
Tools like Google Analytics can be helpful in informing you about your site’s bounce rate. You shall be given an average bounce rate. This marks the first step in getting an idea of what visitors are doing when they are on your page. Google Analytics can even tell you about the bounce rates of all the internal pages of your website. Checking each page bounce rate can help you to analyze which of your web page contents are satisfying the needs of your target customers. You shall realize which of your internal pages need to be improved or altered in order to encourage more visitors to go through the respective page’s content.
In actuality, a bad bounce rate is one where the average time spent on page is almost 0. It clearly signifies that visitors to the site are not taking interest to read your content. In such cases, you might need to consider taking some steps seriously to make your page more valuable and enticing for your prospective customers.
What are the ways to improve your Bounce Rate?
- Well-crafted content
Make sure that your website or web pages have well-written website content. If the content is created by a professional team, it is all the way better and shall yield better results. It is obvious that well-written content shall help you rank higher and shall keep your visitors glued to your site for a longer time duration.
- Suitable website design
Get your website design updated from time to time. Though website design might not bother you at first, but it does matter for most of your visitors. If the design is old or noticeably bad, your visitors might not consider even looking at the precious content of your site! They might feel that your site looks outdated and does not offer updated resources or info. So, make it a point to get your website refreshed periodically.
It is essential for you to prepare your site so that it is search-engine ready. To avoid a high bounce rate, you need to work upon the relevancy of the content of your sites pages. On getting your bounce rate lowered even to a considerable extent, you shall witness a significant rise in conversion rates. This certainly shall attract more visitors to your site through search engines. Thus, you can finally get to claim that your website is usable and effective! Genuine search engines such as Google make sure that visitors are provided with the best possible results for their queries. If you website ranks high in such search engines, it is a full-blown proof that your site is highly resourceful and provides satisfying content for the visitors.
So, it is vital to reduce the bounce rate and heighten the conversion rate for your site. However, for such a grand result, you need to be cautious right from the initial steps of website planning process. The cautiousness should be maintained throughout the later stages of development & marketing. Success in the world of internet marketing is a derivative of low bounce rate or a high site conversion rate.