SEO Tips: Understand, Analyze and Improve the Bounce Rate

First, let’s talk about what is the bounce rate and how Google Analytics calculates it. Bounce rate for a certain page is calculated only when readers land on that page. This metric is telling you if people clicked and navigated deeper in your website or just left.

The thing is that the bounce rate is not taking into account readers that come from other pages of your website. So, a high bounce rate means that people that landed on a page didn’t clicked any link to navigate further.

Analyzing bounce rates

Not all the times a high bounce rate means a bad thing. I see many people saying that a high bounce rate indicates that your content needs improvement because it’s not providing the information users look for. But you can’t say this until you look at the analytics.

If you want to analyze your high bounce rate page go to your Google Analytics accounts, select Content -> Content by Title and sort the results to see the highest bounce rates. Now click one of the pages with high bounce rate and let’s see what you need to look for

1. NOTE: if a page has bounce rate of 80% means that 80% of the readers that landed on that page decided to leave your website. The other 20% stayed on your website and performed at least one more click
2. The first thing to look for is the average time readers spend on your page. The thing is that if you have a decent average time (more than 1 minute or more than 3,5 minutes) a high bounce rate is not necessary something bad. A high bounce rate together with decent average time on that page means that the readers found the content interesting but they didn’t received a good reason to click some more links and read some more. If the average time for that page is just few seconds then you need to understand why. Why people close the page so quickly. Now it’s the time to move further with the analysis
3. You need to know how people get to your page: keywords or other sources – and compare the two overall bounce rates. You need to see what kind of source generates the high bounce rate: basically what needs improvement.
4. Check the Keywords that send you traffic and ask yourself two questions (for each keyword that has a high bounce rate attached to it):
   1. How much relevance does this keyword has to this page? If I would have to describe the page by using a keyword, is this what I would use?
   2. If the keyword has relevancy to the page, do I provide complete information?
5. Check the Source and see from where the users come. It’s possible that this page to be marketed on the wrong channels. Look at the websites that send traffic to that page and see exactly from where because if the link to your page is placed in a content with no relation to the content you’re offering then a high bounce rate is normal.

Improving the bounce rate

Depending on what the analytics offered you here are some things to do, in order to improve the bounce rate:

1. If the average time is high enough for you then you need to decide if you want to determine people to also visit other pages of your website. Maybe your ordering page has a high bounce rate but decent average time and you don’t want people to navigate further. But if you do, think about some links that you could place in your content and that point to other articles on your blog that are related.
2. If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by keywords here are some things to do:
   1. If you can incorporate new information in the article that is relevant to a keyword is ok
   2. If you consider that you already have decent information then check how is presented. Try making the words bold, or italic, or change the colors. If the article is more than 500 words use subtitles to break the content and let people know what each section talks about. The idea is that if someone is interested only in some of your information then he should be able to easily find it, without having to read the entire article
   3. If you can’t incorporate new information, consider writing some new content and place links to the additional articles
3. If the average time is low and the high bounce rate is generated by the source then you may consider other channels for marketing your content

What do you think?

Let me know what you think of this article and how did you improve your high bounce rate. Share your ideas and opinions in comments.