Bounce rate: all you need to know about this SEO indicator
For Google, the number of people who leave a page as soon as they arrive there matters a lot. In fact, it is not that simple.
Your bounce rate indicates the rate of visitors who viewed only one page of the site. This figure is likely to reflect essentially two scenarios:
- The user did not find the information he was looking for and left immediately.
- On the contrary, the Internet user immediately found what he was looking for… and left almost immediately!
Before jumping to any hasty conclusions, consider correlating this number with the time spent on that page. Combining this information is still the best way to obtain a result as close as possible to reality.
The variations between the sites according to their contents are enormous. If you are looking for which river crosses the city of Auch (the Gers in this case), the display of a single page is sufficient. Ditto with a cooking recipe or how to prune an orange tree from Mexico.
On a blog, the bounce rate can reach 70%, while on a merchant site, it is generally between 40 and 60%. To find a linen sweater on an e-commerce site, visitors often consult many pages.
A good way to keep an Internet user is to offer him internal links in order to make him discover the editorial richness of the site.
Without focusing too much on the numbers, it is still fashionable to try to decrease your bounce rate. Objective: to retain Internet users and thus convert their traffic… into sales!
How to improve your bounce rate?
For Google, a low bounce rate proves the interest that Internet users have in a site. If your bounce rate is too high, here are 5 simple tips to reverse the trend.
Lowering its bounce rate does not require major adjustments. To make sure your visitors take the time to visit multiple pages, here are five easy-to-implement tips.
- Place in each text a Hyperlink, which offers visitors the opportunity to navigate the site on a new page… likely to interest them of course!
- Make sure the loading time of your pages is not too slow. A visitor who waits 10 seconds for a page to download is an annoyed visitor who leaves… even before the page opens! In addition, Google will penalize this page.
- Put yourself in the Internet user's shoes. What does he want ? Meet his expectations and don't try to cheat him.
- Treat her presentation of your pages : pleasant graphics, clear navigation, airy pages are all incentives to continue reading.
- Prefer them short, well-structured texts (title, hat, intertitles), more than excessively long texts, which discourage visitors. When a hat exists, 95% of Internet users read it (Eye Tracking study, Poynter Institute, 2008).
Remember that your site should be well designed, structured and welcoming.
The most knowledgeable will find more details on Google Analytics. On this subject, we are pretty sure that Google Analytics itself has a high bounce rate: once we have found the technical information we are looking for, we leave!
