
Bounce rate is a term that you would often encounter in Search Engine Optimization. At first glance, this might look to be just another piece of jargon. But there is more to it. Bounce rate is an important metric that plays a crucial part in determining the overall ‘worthiness’ of your website. The more ‘worthy’ your website is, the higher its chance of showing up on search engine result pages. So, what exactly is the bounce rate and how does it matter for your website? Let’s find out.
In the simplest of terms, bounce rate could be defined as the percentage of visitors to a website to navigate away from it, after visiting just one page.
For example, you have an online shoe store and you have a page for Nike Air Jordans. Now, that page might be ranking on Google SERPs. So, someone visits the page but spends very little time on the page and doesn’t click on any other link to check out the other pages on your website. Such a visitor would be counted towards the bounce rate.
In such cases, search engines think that your website doesn’t have enough relevant information. Therefore, when your website has a higher bounce rate, it would have a lesser chance of getting to the top of Google rankings.
Another term that you often encounter is the Exit Rate. It is easy to get confused between the two since by definition they both are almost similar.
For example, if a user lands on page 1 of your website, stays there for a minute or so, and hits their browser’s back button to the referring page, that counts towards the bounce rate. But if, after landing on page 1, they go to page 2, and then quit their browser or visit another site, that would count towards your exit rate.
The two rates indicate two different issues. While a higher bounce rate indicates a lack of interest in your website, a higher exit rate would mean that there are certain issues with your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
So, what is a ‘good’ bounce rate? Well, it depends on the website. You might think that having a higher bounce rate is always bad. But it is not necessarily so. If you have a single-page website, a blog, or an eCommerce website, then a high bounce rate might not be as bad as you think. All you need to do is to determine what the desired action is for the user on your website. Then you could understand whether a higher bounce rate is good or bad.
Generally speaking, a bounce rate in the 26% to 40% range is good enough for most sites. 41% to 55% is considered to be average, and anything beyond 56% is considered to be too high. Again, this depends on your website.
At Strive System Webtech, bounce rate and other such metrics form an important part of our SEO strategy. If we find that the bounce rate is too high, then we can use one or several of the below techniques to keep the rate in check:
So, if you are worried about the higher bounce rate, get in touch with the experts and get their expert advice in fixing the issues and get your rankings to the top.