Bounce Rate: How It Can Affect Your Website and SEO? | Is it good or bad to have a high bounce rate?Bounce rate is calculated upon the total number of visitors for a certain period of time divided with the visitors that leave the website and never return. In this article, you will find out how bounce rate can affect your website and SEO. We will also show you some examples of bounce rates for different type of websites.
What Kind Of Bounce Rate That Is Good For Your Website?
As mentioned before, the bounce rate depends very much on the type of website you have. For example, if you have a landing page with a call to action such as subscription form or add to cart button, most likely the bounce rate will be around 90%, because the majority of visitors will leave the page in a way or other (hitting the back button or making the purchase) and only few visitors will return to your page later. News portals and content websites can have lower bounce rates around 30%, because users tend to come back again and again to look for new information. This infographic designed by Kissmetrics is a very good presentation of bounce rate for different website types and industries.
Should you be concerned about high bounce rate? Should you bother trying to improve the bounce rate of your site? Well, you should definitely do something about it. For instance, you are running a blog about web design inspiration that receives 1000 hits per month. You bounce rate for this website is 80%, which means that 80% of your visitors (800 people) come to your page, get the information they need and never come back. From this you can already conclude that a lower bounce rate is what you should achieve. High bounce rate can be caused by lot of things: your users are unhappy with your website look (if you are having the same design for years and do not upgrading it to latest standards it can be a problem), the content is not as good as visitors expect (short, irrelevant content can also cause high bouncing), the website is hard to navigate (missing navigation or broken links will lead the user to leave your page). You should consider fixing, reworking your website and make it user friendly.
A high bounce ratio can also greatly affect your SEO work. Google is built in such way to detect how much time users spend on your website and can also calculates the bounce rate. A high bounce rate will tell Google that your website does not provide value, it has low quality content, and users do not like it. So, there is no reason to give as much importance to your site, listing it lower on the search results.
How To Decrease Bounce Rate Of Your Website?
The first thing you should do to decrease the bounce rate is to install Google Analytics to your website. This is a free tool provided by Google that will tell you exactly how people are using your website, how much time they spend on it and what is the exact bounce ratio. Once you have enough information, and you understand visitor’s behavior and you know exactly who your audience is, you can make the necessary changes to your website.
Improving navigation, design, speed, adding more valuable and informative content can greatly reduce the bounce. While around 50% or web users will use a smart phone or a table to navigate on the internet, you should consider making your website responsive.
As you can see, bounce ratio can be decreased easily if you know how to do it. As the web evolves, users may have different needs while searching for information, so most likely methods that worked in the past are not working anymore, so websites should also evolve and adapt to satisfy the visitor. Whatever the design or the content is causing the high bounce rate, you should urgently take action and make the necessary changes to keep your website interesting providing value to the user. This way you will not only convert new visitors into leads but your old users will also check back frequently, keeping the bounce at low level. Hopefully this article helped you to consider working on the bounce rate of your site and you understood how important is to keep it at a very low ratio.