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Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the
position of that page in the search results?
What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to
get a better bounce rate?
What is the bounce rate?
There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the
percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the
percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of
time (only a few seconds).
The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of
traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out
where your web pages could be improved.
Google's definition of the bounce rate
The Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as
follows:
"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e.
visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate
generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't
relevant to your visitors."
This Google definition already indicates that Google thinks that
web pages with a high bounce rate aren't relevant to website
visitors. If your web pages have a high bounce rate for a search
term, Google might lower the rankings of your website for that search
term.
Does Google use the bounce rate as a ranking
factor?
Google has the ability to collect the bounce rate with the Google
toolbar and Google Analytics. In addition, Google can measure the
time between visits to their search engine by the same user and they
can use the Google Chrome browser to measure the complete surfing
behavior of users.
Last month, a webmaster performed a test that showed a significant ranking change as a
result of a significant bounce rate change. The test is not very
conclusive but chances are that Google really uses the bounce rate as
a ranking factor.
The bounce rate alone might not be used by Google but combined
with other factors, it could have an effect on the rankings. For
example, Google could measure how many people start a new search for
the same topic after visiting your web page. That would be an
indicator that your website is not suitable for the chosen
keyword.
What can you do to lower the bounce rate of your web
pages?
A high bounce rate is usually a sign of a low quality web page.
This means that your web page either doesn't offer what the visitor
is searching for or the usability of your web page isn't good.
If you improved the contents and the usability of your web pages,
you might lower your bounce rate from 75% to 65%. This would lead to
a remarkable 40% increase in conversions (35 out of 100 visitors now
stay on your website instead of 25 out of 100 visitors).
In addition to improving the usability of your web pages, you can
lower your bounce rate by tailoring your landing pages to the
keywords and ads that you run. If your landing pages offer the
information that the searchers are looking for then you will get a
lower bounce rate.
Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages has two major benefits:
it's likely that you will get more visitors from search engines and you
will get a higher conversion rate. The only exceptions to the scenario
above are one page websites and web pages that offer very compelling
content on a single web page (for example Wikipedia pages).
Search engines use many more ranking factors than just the bounce
rate. If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search
engines, you should make sure that your web pages offer all elements
that are necessary to get high rankings
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