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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Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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