Google Algorithm Update – Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Signal?

Is bounce rate now considered as part of a website ranking criteria? After the release of the data about the Panda winners and losers in the UK, SearchMetrics said:

“It seems that all the loser sites are sites with a high bounce rate and a less time on site ratio. Price comparison sites are nothing more than a search engine for products. If you click on a product you ‘bounce’ to the merchant. So if you come from Google to ciao.co.uk listing page, than you click on an interesting product with a good price and you leave the page. On Voucher sites it is the same. And on content farms like ehow you read the article and mostly bounce back to Google or you click Adsense.”

“And on the winners are more trusted sources where users browse and look for more information,” the firm added. “Where the time on site is high and the page impressions per visit are also high. Google’s ambition is to give the user the best search experience. That’s why they prefer pages with high trust, good content and sites that showed in the past that users liked them.”

WebmasterWorld Founder Brett Tabke wrote in a recent forum post, discussing what he calls the “Panda metric“, that:

“Highly successful, high referral, low bounce, quality, and historical pages have seen a solid boost with panda.”

Google’s Matt Cutts recent video on ranking in 2011 talks about increasing site speed, and how this can keep users on your site longer (IE: not bouncing), you can increase your ROI. Speed is a ranking signal. We know that. Speed can reduce bounce rate. Even if Google doesn’t use bounce rate directly, there is a strong relationship here.



Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand said:

“It’s important to note how Google defines Bounce Rate,” he adds. This is below:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.”

He also points to how it is defined in Google Analytics:

“The percentage of single page visits resulting from this set of pages or page.”

“Personally, I don’t think that a single page visit is a bad thing. To me, it tells me the visitor found what they were looking for. Isn’t that what Google would want? If I were Google, I’d want a searcher to find the answer to their search on the exact page they clicked on in a search result…not 1 or 2 clicks in. If I were Google, I’d look more at ‘Who Bounces off that page, and returns to the same Google search, and clicks on someone else, and then never returns to your site,’ but I’m not Google, and that’s just my ‘if I were Google’ thoughts”.

“I think most agree that there’s a ‘Page Score’ or a ‘set of pages score,’ and when that has a bad score, it affects those pages, and somehow ripples up the site,” Boykin adds. “It could quite well be that if you have a page that links out to 100 internal pages, and if 80 of those pages are ‘low quality’ than it just might affect that page as well. A lot of this is hard to prove, but there are some smoking guns that can point in this direction.”

“Bounce rate is important, and yes, many sites that got hit did have a high bounce rate, but comparing this to sites/pages that weren’t hit doesn’t exactly show any ‘ah ha’ moments of ‘hey, if your bounce rate is over 75%, then you got Panda pooped on,’ because the bounce rate Google shows the public is missing many key metrics that they know, but don’t share with us.”

I think the best advice you can follow in relation to all of this is to simply find ways on how to further improve every page of your website and keep people from leaving your site, before they complete the task you want them to complete. That means providing content they want.

What do you think?

Bounce Rate: What you Need To Know About High and Low Bounce Rates

What is a Bounce rate?
According to Google's Analytics help pages, a bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

When is Bounce Rate a Relevant Metric?

• If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.
• If exploration of your site is important to your goals.
• If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.
• If yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.
• If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other 'teaser' content.

What a Low Bounce Rate Mean:

A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website - 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal - signaling that visitors are engaged with your site and finding useful content. A high bounce rate is often assumed to mean that your site is not doing its job. In reality, bounce rate means different things for different sites and the emphasis you place on it will vary according to the type of site you have and its goals.


What a High Bounce Rate Mean:

1. Keywords and content are mismatched - In cases where visitors are coming from search engines, a high bounce rate may mean that the keywords they used and the content they found on your site are not aligned - so your site doesn't meet their expectations in some way.
   
   What you can do:
   
   Analyze your keyword traffic and make sure your pages are optimized for the keywords you want and that the content is closely aligned with keywords and not misleading in any way.
2. The next step in your conversion or goal process is not obvious or easy enough.
   
   What you can do:
   Look at your landing pages with an objective eye and make the next step clear and easy to take.
3. The navigation on your site is confusing or unclear, making additional content hard to find.
   
   What you can do:
   
   Re-evaluate the navigation and see if there are ways to streamline or simplify. Also double-check for browser compatibility - perhaps the page is not displaying correctly under some conditions.
4. Your offer or product is not presented in a compelling or easy to understand way.
   
   What you can do:
   
   Look at your sales copy or offér details and see if you can refresh it or make it more appealing. You could try split-testing different versions to see which performs better.
5. Your site has technical problems. Particularly if your bounce rate suddenly spikes or displays an unusual trend, it could be an indication of technical issues - broken images or links, or something on the page not loading correctly.
   
   What you can do:
   
   Check for compatibility and broken links. Test the load speed of the page and generally make sure your code is as clean and functional as possible. Check for server outages and other issues that could have temporarily affected the functionality of your site.

A high bounce rate might not be a problem if:

• You have a blog homepage containing all your recent posts in their entirety - Blogger blogs are notorious for this. When all your posts are presented up front there would be little reason for someone to clíck to any other pages.

• You have a loyal blog following and your site has a higher proportion of returning visitors than new visitors. Your followers and subscribers may just want to read the newest post and have no need to visit other pages.

• you are promoting a landing page which contains the call to action within it, such as submitting an email address. That single page can do its job effectively without requiring further clicks.

• the call to action or conversion takes your visitor off-site - to an external shopping cart or email sign up for example. This would look like a bounce, but can still be a conversion.

• Blogs typically have higher bounce rates compared to other types of sites so the same benchmarks do not apply.

Bounce Rate is Not the Only Metric.

Don't look at bounce rate in isolation - look at the overall picture of your website and how it's performing according to the metrics that matter to you. What DO you want your visitors to do at your site? Are you making it easy for them to do that, and are you measuring it?

Look for trends and other data that give you a fuller picture of what the bounce rate really means:

1. Is the bounce rate higher or lower for certain keywords?
2. Does it vary according to how people found your site? Search engines vs. social media, for example.
3. How does it vary with New vs. Returning visitors?
4. Which particular pages or types of content on your site have higher or lower bounce rates?
5. Look also at length of time the visitor spends on the page which could indicate whether or not they are reading what they find - this is very important for a blog.