What Is A Bounce Rate And How It Affects SEO.
A website owner may wonder what is a bounce rate and how it affects SEO. A bounce rate, also known as turnaround, is an important factor used to determine the relevance of a site for a particular keyword. A high turnaround can negatively impact the ranking of a website. Minimizing this statistic insures that a site is not incurring penalties from the search engines, which ultimately affects the SEO of the site.
A bounce rate is way to qualify the traffic a website receives. The turnaround is calculated by looking at the length of time search-engine visitors stay on a site and whether these visitors navigate to other pages within the site. If a significant portion of traffic leaves the website within a few seconds or do not visit another page on that site, the turnaround for this site will be high.
Most website owners want their bounce rate to be between 10 to 30 percent. A statistic more than 50 percent is too high and indicates a need for some reconfiguration. An extremely low turnaround, such as 1 to 3 percent, may indicate issues with analytic coding or some other problem. It is rare for websites to have a turnaround lower than 5 percent.
No one knows the exact algorithms used for ranking well in the search engines. However, it is speculated that the bounce rate is part of this configuration for ranking a site. Thus, if a website possesses an extremely high turnaround, the search engines may reduce the importance of the website and rank it lower than other sites that do not possess a high turnaround.
A bounce rate is an indicator of the quality of content, traffic and overall design of websites. A high statistic tells the search engines the content on the website is irrelevant to the searched keyword. The search engines tend to penalize websites with a high turnaround and lowers the site ranking for the primary search term.
On the other hand, if a site has high-quality content that is related to the search term, the turnaround of a website is likely to be low. Individuals searching for keywords usually want to stay on a website and read about their searched term. The search engines tend to reward websites for a lower turnaround and move them up in the search-engine rankings.
A website owner can improve this statistic by publishing quality content on their designated keyword. Additionally, interlinking to related posts at the end of the article and within the content can increase clicks to other pages within the site. Also, including the search box and an about page in an easy-to-find location provides optimal navigation for the readers. Websites should be programmed to have all external links open in a new window. This keeps the site open even when visitors have decided to navigate to other venues.
In summary, the answer to what is a bounce rate and how it affects SEO is the time traffic spends on a site. The shorter amount of time people spend on a site will indicate a higher turnaround. This affects the SEO of the site, because it indicates to the search engines that the site content is not a good match for the searched term. The search engines may decrease the ranking of the website.