If you manage your company's website or report on its performance, bounce rate can be the bane of your existence. Why did your bounce rate increase? How do you fix it? How does bounce rate affect your SEO?
Read on to find all of these answers, as well as information about how to fix a high bounce rate, that we often get in our digital strategy work for new client websites.
What does bounce rate mean?
An action that results in a bounce is a single-page action on your website. The bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions that ended in a bounce, within a defined time period.
A bounce occurs when a user visits one of your pages but Google Analytics does not record any other action or event before they leave your site. By default, scrolling is not part of an action - only CTA buttons and menu options that link to another on-site page, or event clicks that you set up in Google Analytics or Tag Manager.
Does bounce rate affect SEO?
In Google Analytics, your bounce rate doesn't influence Google's ranking of your site or content, whether you have a high bounce rate or a low bounce rate. Bounce rate is displayed right up at the top of the Audience Overview dashboard in Google Analytics. Many Search Engine Optimization tools also show bounce rate as a website health indicator.
The bounce rate isn't explicitly used by Google to calculate your ranking, but it does reflect the engagement of your visitors and the effectiveness of your pages and content. In addition to poor mobile speed and weak content, a high rate can indicate other issues that definitely impact your ranking.
What’s a healthy rate?
It has been estimated that the average bounce rate for a website is between 26% and 70% but SEO experts have differing opinions on this issue. Lower than 10% of that range would be considered a happy zone, and higher than that would indicate a problem that should be investigated.
You should analyze the purpose of your website, the content on it, and where the visitors are coming from before making a decision.
Despite having a higher bounce rate, a contact page can still serve its purpose because someone is visiting to find your hours or phone number. Additionally, blog posts, ad campaigns, and mobile sessions tend to skew to the high end.
What causes my bounce rate to be so low?
It is common to encounter errors in your Google Analytics tracking code when your bounce rate is 25% or lower.
There have been several instances where the number was 'normal' and suddenly plummeted to 9 or 10%. It was always the case that the original Google Analytics tracking code would be added to the site along with a Google Tag Manager code.
In Google Analytics, when you have two tracking codes on the same page, it will report two page views - it believes someone looked at two pages, but in reality, they only looked at one, so no bounce is recorded.
There is only one code that needs to be removed. When removing a code, pick the one that has the most historical data, but make sure you save any data recorded by that code.
What is the reason for the high bounce rate?
A slow-loading page (especially on mobile) will lead to people leaving your website.
False advertising: It's likely you'll see a bounce if the meta description in the search results, the headline or content in a social media post, or the ad copy does not match.
It is very unlikely that people will stay on your site if they encounter a 404 error, unless the 404 page is exceptionally awesome and encourages them to explore the site.
Poor content: If your content is hard to read and grammatically incorrect, or it looks old, then it's easier for searchers to bounce back to the results and find a better option.
Site bounce rate vs. individual content: Your site’s bounce rate might be the result of one or two massively high-traffic pages with high bounce rates.
Content points somewhere else: Your pages and posts have links to other sites, with no incentive to return to your site.
Bad user experience (UX): Is there too much lead generation clutter getting in the way, or is the navigation downright confusing?
Traffic channel: As with content, one channel with a high proportion of your site’s total traffic can throw off bounce rate.
You need to look at your Google Analytics data to find out the real reason for a high bounce rate. You need to do detective work on the data to find out the real reason.
When is a high bounce rate acceptable?
People panic when they see a high bounce rate, especially one that was previously lower. In general, a high bounce rate is not always a problem, as there are some circumstances that naturally result in a high bounce rate that you should not be concerned about.
- The primary goal of your content is to direct people to the websites of other businesses.
- You have a one-page micro site with no secondary content available.
- The page in question provides quick access to information such as contact information, menu options, or event schedules.
- Bounce rates for blog posts are frequently much higher than for primary landing pages.
- The content is a high-quality resource, such as a tutorial or guide, which provides so much assistance that the reader is completely satisfied.
- Visitors from social media or advertisements tend to view the piece of content that piqued their interest and then leave because visitors are on the go or multitasking, mobile traffic has a higher bounce rate than desktop traffic.
If
you examine the dwell time (average time on page) of your high-bounce content,
you may notice that visitors are spending a significant amount of time reading
it. This indicates that it is of high quality, and you should not be concerned.
What Else Can We Do To Reduce Bounce Rate…read more
Comments
Post a Comment