What does it mean to bounce?
Have you ever opened a website and realised, within seconds, that this isn’t what you were looking for? What do you do after that? You immediately close the website.
This is called bouncing. When you exit from your initial landing page without clicking on any other link- that’s bouncing.
When a visitor bounces, they don’t interact with the other pages of your site. Which basically means, they don’t engage with your site at all.
In this article, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about Bounce Rate. What is it? Why should you care about it? What factors affect the Bounce Rate and also, how to reduce it. Keep reading.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of one-page visits you have on your website.
This is the formula to calculate Bounce Rate:
How to find out the parameters that you need to calculate your bounce rate? From any site analytics tool. If you want a free analytics tool, go for Google Analytics.
A low bounce rate is great. This means most of your users are actively engaging with your site. A high bounce rate is a huge problem. This is why most sites are fixated on reducing bounce rates.
Why does Bounce Rate matter?
The very first reason why it matters is kind of obvious. If you have an eCommerce site and people leave at the landing page, they aren’t buying.
High bounce rates equal low conversions. Since the entire point of having an eCommerce site is optimizing conversions, a high bounce rate is not desirable.
But there’s another controversial question that everyone wonders:
Does a High Bounce Rate Affect my Google Ranking?
There’s no easy way to answer this because Google is not very transparent about its ranking parameters.
According to the most recent announcement that Google made regarding its ranking criteria, quality of content matters.
Previously Google relied on easily calculable metrics like the number of backlinks. But now, the number isn’t the only thing that matters. Quality does.
Google’s E-A-T SEO has become the buzzword since 2018. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. This means Google cares more about the E-A-T aspect of your site than the number of backlinks you have.
Google’s RankBrain is also a major concern. Recently Google started using machine learning to understand what quality, authority, and relevance meant when it came to content.
Why am I telling you all this and what does it have to do with bounce rates?
It cannot be said for certain. But it’s possible that Google uses bounce rates as a parameter to judge quality of content.
After all, what signal is sent to Google when a lot of your visitors leave the site from the first page? The signal is obvious- they did not find what they were looking for. Or, what they found wasn’t useful enough.
According to Backlinko’s Brian Dean, there is a close correlation between bounce rates and Google ranking.
However, you must know something before you start worrying about your bounce rate.
Google takes visit duration into account in conjugation with bounce rates. Bounce Rates are not the only metric that matters. I will explain why this is important.
In Conclusion
Now you can finally stop worrying about your bounce rate. They matter, yes, but they cannot spell the doom of your site. A lot of other metrics matter as well. Also, now that you know what mistakes not to make, your bounce rate will surely not peak.
Do you think your site has an issue that is increasing your bounce rate? Let us know in the comments below so that we can solve your problem!
