Why Should I Pay Attention to Bounce Rate?

First, let's define bounce rate. 

It's very simple. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site that leave after viewing only one page.

While defining bounce rate is easy, understanding and evaluating it is more difficult. Seeing a high bounce rate may or may not be bad. If customers are landing on a specific page and they engage with you from that page and leave, you may still consider the visit successful. Engagement can come from an online sale, a submitted form, an email, or a phone call.

Is bounce rate a ranking factor? 

Sort of. Bounce rate is not believed to be included in the search algorithm. But, a single page visit to your site may show the search engine that your page was not what they were searching for, and that is a factor in ranking. Search engines attempt to rank by searcher intent, and an important measurement of intent is interaction.

What can you do to reduce bounce rate?

Let's start with on page options.

1. Make sure the text on your page is easy to read. Reread your content for structure, grammar and spelling. You must also consider your font and color choices. For more detail, take a look at our topic on adding text.
2. Make sure your site navigation is easy to follow. Your links should be clear and descriptive. If a visitor isn't sure what to click on, they will likely leave your site. 
3. Make sure your page title, page descriptions, and meta tags for a page match the content of the page. If not, search engines might determine you are trying to game the system.
4. Use relevant images and videos to engage your audience. You can read a little more in our design tips topic.

If you have everything looking great and still want to lower your bounce rate, then you need to get more information. Google Analytics can provide a ton of information. As defined above, bounce rate is basically the number of one page visitors to your site. This is the default reporting in your Google Analytics account. Google does offer extensive segmenting options so you can gather more information. 

Here are a few segmentation options:

1. Gender
2. Browser
3. Region
4. Device
5. Affinity
6. Age
7. And more plus custom variables

Once you know more, you can come up with a strategy to try to further reduce your bounce rate.