If you are using Google Analytics, you would be well familiar with the word bounce rate. Let us see what the definition of bounce rate according to GA is?

According to Google Analytics:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

You can read the original explanation here at What does Bounce Rate mean?

In a simpler sense, a user visits your website either through your listing in the organic SERPs or through clicking your paid ads and exits from the same page, where it lands without visiting any other page on your website is called bounce and the percentage of bounce is known as bounce rate

There may be two factors which causes this to happen.

• The visitor might be searching for a very small and to the point (say one word) information and your page is highly relevant for what he is searching for, he got what he wanted and quits. For an example, if someone searching for “where was the president George Bush born” and lands to your webpage and finds the answer in the first few lines, there are 99% chances that he will quit the next moment as he has his answers handy.
• The second case is, the visitor does not find what he was searching for and this is the reason for most of the cases of bounced visitors. A visitor searching for information on topic”XYZ”, lands on your webpage and doesn’t find it and pushes the back button without waiting any more.

This is the main case of bounced visitors and you should take every step necessary for reducing it.

You can test different elements on your webpage to reduce bounce rate and increase visitor engagement with the website. I have written some posts regarding how to chose different elements for your webpage and how to prepare great content for your visitors, which you must have a look, it may help you minimize your bounce rate.

Now the question is whether bounce rate affects your organic rankings?

Different SEO’s have contrary views over this topic. Some say yes and some No. But I have experienced that a high bounce rate definitely affects your organic rankings.

Think it in this way. Google always try to provide high quality and relevant results to its users for their query, why would they list a webpage for which they know that users do not like it for a particular query?

Or take it in another way with an offline example. Suppose you are a consultant whose job is to refer people to the persons (list a number of webpages) who can provide solution to their problems (query). Will you keep referring them to a person about whom people complain a lot of time that they didn’t provide the solution they needed. The obvious answer is NO, you won’t.

So now you can think over this that bounce rate really affects your organic rankings, so apply every effort to reduce it.

Do not use blackhat ways: Some webmasters install some malicious script which disables the Back button of the browsers once their website is open, or some other script which blank the referrer when they hit the back button in their browsers, so that the user appears a new one to the search engines. Never try these shady methods, as sooner or later you will be banned for your malicious activities.

In coming posts we will discuss different factors for reducing the bounce rate.

What is your opinion on “bounce rate and organic ranking”, please let us know by posting them in comments.

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