No, a bounce rate isn’t the amount of times you can bounce a ball in a set amount of time. Though, that would be fun to try out when you have some free time and a ball in hand. But that’s not the point of this blog. The point of this post is to help you better understand what a bounce rate is and how it effects the SEO on your website.
I know what you’re thinking, “just get to the point already!” And I hear you, so I will. So, what is a bounce rate? A bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who visit your website and do absolutely nothing before leaving. That’s right - absolutely. nothing.
The visitor doesn’t click on a menu item, they don’t “read more,” and they most definitely don’t make a purchase of any kind. But why does this all matter? For one, when someone leaves your site without clicking on anything, Google Analytics only receives a single site trigger, which translates to low website engagement. In turn, low website engagement tells Google that the content on your website is not relevant to your audience.
When this happens, it’s not good news. If Google views the content on your website as irrelevant to your industry, then your website will get moved further down in the search engine results pages.
According to Google Analytics, you’ll want to look at your bounce rate from different perspectives. With their analytics tools, you can view the overall bounce rate for your site, for each channel grouping, for each source/medium pair, and for individual pages. With this information, you’ll be able to see exactly how high your bounce rate is and try to dig deeper to figure out what may be causing people to not click through on anything on your site.
Of course, none of this is that easy to take care of when you’re busy running a business. But that’s why we’re here. At Greyphin, we offer SEO services where we can take a look at your analytics and figure out what your bounce rate is and what we can do to try to remedy the situation. As always, we’re here when you need us - just drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help.