Is bounce rate important for your site?
Does Google demote a high bouncing web-page in search engine ranking?
My answer is “not always”
Technically speaking Bounce Rate means:
The percentage of visitors who enter the site by any means (search engine, social media, etc.), view a single page and leave the site without visiting any other pages.
Table of Contents
What’s the purpose of a web-page?
Tell me one thing – Why a webmaster creates a page? Or, what’s the basic purpose of a web-page in general?
To accomplish or achieve something, right? Like teaching or giving solutions to the visitors, selling some products, email subscription, entertainment and offering Ad units to click, etc. Different web-pages have different aim or needs.
Why Google ranks a web-page high?
When a web-page achieves its goal, or when a piece of content fulfills the needs of web-surfers in a better way than others – Google ranks it higher.
During the process, Google takes the help of different ranking signals like – How relevant is the piece of article (query), total time spent on the page, social media shares, co-mentions and backlinks on other websites etc. All these methods are simply to gauge the popularity and satisfaction level of the web-searchers or visitors.
Why I don’t care bounce rate too much?
There is an article with heading “How to Increase Page Rank – 18 Great Tips” on my blog Anantvijaysoni.in.
If you do a Google search for the term increase page rank the article always appears on the 1st page. Usually on top 5 positions, depending on the browser, country, territory, and devices, etc. For the last 8 months, it has maintained the position.
With monthly page views of more than 18,000, do you know what’s the bounce rate of this page?
It’s a whopping 83.68%. Still, I’m very happy Then why Google ranks this page so high? It is because – This page fulfills the needs of the visitors or web-searchers. They become happy after reading the article for the keywords they were searching for. They don’t need a further reference about the subject matter on this blog. That’s why they leave (bounce), happily.
If a web-page accomplishes its task perfectly, making web-searchers happy; why not Google rank it so high, despite a high bounce rate. For your info – 80% or more bounce rate is considered critical.
Other examples
Take for example – An affiliate product page. Don’t you become happy with more number of sales, despite a high bounce rate? This page is bound to bounce while performing the transaction with 3rd party services like PayPal etc.
Don’t you like the sound of AdSense click, when a visitor reads an article (single page) on your blog and click on the Ad unit?
Final words: Unless and until the web-page doesn’t fulfill the needs of visitors or time spent on the page is extremely low, you shouldn’t worry about the bounce rate of your blog. You shouldn’t consider deleting or re-writing the blog post due to fear of Panda.
Check out the below tweet of Danny Sullivan, the SEO Guru of SearchEngineLand.
Do you need more proof? Huh, I don’t think so.
