Tracking Google Analytics or related tools regularly is really necessary for analyzing your website’s SEO growth. Most of these tools include a field called bounce rate, which indicates the engagement of users on your website. The bounce rate of a website will indicate the total number of visitors visiting a webpage and leaving without any other clicks such as new page visits, form submission, click on call-to-action, read more clicks, etc… This is usually calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the total number of sessions on the site. In short, we can consider bounce rate as the users who triggered only one request to the analytics server.
Does bounce rate affect Google ranking factors? No, it doesn’t directly affect your organic traffic. But, indirectly it will. I.e; what can be the reason for users to leave your site without reviewing related data? There can be two possibilities. The first one is poor technical SEO status and the next can be content-related. Technical SEO is related to website design and development. This includes the user-friendly approach of the website, responsive design, page loading speed, duplicate content, crawling & indexing, url structure, etc… In Search Engine Optimization, content is always the king. If your content is not trustworthy or unique, your search engine ranking will definitely go down. The existing content also needs to be updated in a regular manner.
Next, we can interpret bounce rate. A bounce rate that is less than 40% is always considered an optimal rate. Whereas, a bounce rate greater than 70% can be interpreted as poor. In general, having a high value of bounce rate indicates that your audience leaves the webpage immediately without further engagement. The real impact of bounce rate can be predicted only by considering the motto of your website. I.e; if your website goal is to convert visits to sales, the high bounce rate is a major issue. But, if you have a single-page website or content designed for single-page sessions then, this won’t be an issue.
In conclusion, we can mention some solutions to reduce the bounce rate of your website. Before working on the solution, it is important to find web pages having the highest exit volume. Then follow the solutions mentioned below.
- Improve the speed of websites by removing unwanted plugins and files
- Optimize the website for different devices
- Include Call-to-Action buttons and align them properly according to the website structure
- Improve the quality of content
- Target keywords having high search volume
- Revise meta tags and meta descriptions
