Bounce rate is the topic of our second article on Google Analytics Key Metrics. You’re probably wondering what Bounce Rate has to do with website analytics. After all, it sounds like a stat that you’d hear in a sport like basketball. But it’s an important metric – it indicates the percentage of visitors to your website that leave your website without taking any action. An action can be defined as filling out a form, clicking through to another page on your site, or purchasing an item in your online store.  You want this number to be low as a higher bounce rate typically indicates that your site visitors aren’t finding what they need on your site.

Target Score:

Our research has shown that what’s considered a “good” bounce rate varies by the type of content on your site. We generally recommend that you keep your bounce rate below 50%. However, a higher score may be okay if your website is a blog or a site filled with articles. That’s because visitors may be looking for an answer to a question and the page they land on from your site provides the answer.

Websites that are primarily online stores should target a bounce rate of less than 35%. Unlike blogs, e-commerce products don’t have an acceptable reason for a high bounce rate.

How Bounce Rate Impacts SEO:

We’re not privy to details behind Google’s ranking methods, but one would think that Bounce Rate would be a huge factor. However, that’s not the case. Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, stated during Google Webmaster Central office-hours that this is not the case. The video is embedded below and queued up to where he states “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the Analytics Bounce Rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that having a high bounce rate won’t negatively impact your rankings as there are most likely other factors contributing to that rate. For example, if your website loads slowly, visitors are more likely to bounce it. Google did a study in 2017 that found that an increase in load time from one second to 5 seconds increases bounce rate by 90%

How to Improve Bounce Rate on Your Website:

Poor bounce rate can be due to a number of factors including:

• Slow page load.
• Missing or unclear call to action.
• No internal links on the page.
• No action for the visitor to take on the page.
• Poorly quality or inaccurate content.
• Content that doesn’t address the question the visitor is looking to get answered.

Some of the recommendations we provide our clients include:

• Linking to related content.
• Showing related posts/articles.
• A clear call to action on each page.
• Engaging, high-quality content.

Some of these items are easier to address than others. We offer a complimentary website consultation to help you fix items like a high bounce rate.