Bounce Rate Is A Ranking Factor

One fairly recent change in online marketing SEO is Google’s decision to put a little more emphasis on bounce rate, exit rate, the amount of time a visitor spends on your website and how often visitors return.

Google has the ability to analysis this data and use it to determine a websites importance and value when Google goes to rank a webpage or website and decide how high in the search results to place it.

This is normally referred to as ‘SEO Metrics’ and as mentioned above there has been a shift by Google in putting more emphasis on these factors when determining how high to rank a website or webpage.

Online Marketing SEO: What Exactly Are The Bounce Rate And The Exit Rate?
Let’s define these online marketing SEO terms first so we can understand what we are talking about.

The two most important of these online marketing SEO factors are the ‘Bounce Rate’ and the ‘Exit Rate’ so let’s take a close look at understanding what is meant by these two terms

Bounce!

The ‘Bounce Rate’ is when someone visits a single webpage on your website and then clicks off that webpage without visiting any other page on your website.

The ‘Exit Rate’ is a percentage determined by a visitor leaving a particular page of your website compared to the number of visits that particular webpage has had.

So an ‘Exit Rate’ factor only occurs when someone visits more than one page on your website and that ‘Exit Rate’ is assigned to the particular webpage that was the last page they visited and clicked off from.
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Online Marketing SEO: How Do I Find Out What The Bounce Rate And Exit Rate Are For My Website?
The easiest way I know to do this is to use Google Analytics. (I am developing some material on Google Analytics for the very near future.)

What Is A Good Target For Good Online Marketing SEO For The Bounce Rate and The Exit Rate?

A bounce rate of 25% is considered acceptable though in some cases it is mentioned that a keyword phrase can accidentally lead to irrelevant search results.

As an example is someone types in: “How To Get Great Flowers” and they will be presented with sites on Flower Photography, Wedding Flowers, Buying Flowers, and Growing Flowers. However, with the title and the description displayed on the search results returned page, I would expect these irrelevant clicks that would be considered a bounce would be limited quite a bit.

For a website with a natural flow to a last page you would naturally find that page to have a high exit rate.

For a blog such as this website you would want to be concerned with two things:

If your home page had a high bounce rate as well as a high exit rate.
If one or two individual pages have a high exit rate you would want to consider either changing the content or layout of these pages or actual deleting them from your site altogether.
And, of course, if the bounce rate and exit rate is high for your home page you really need to look at what you can change about it from content to layout and quickly address this problem. It could be something as simple as the page taking too long to load or it may be in need of a more extensive adjustment by changing the content and / or the look of the home page.
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Online Marketing SEO: Why Are The Bounce Rate and Exit Rate Important to Know?
There are two important reasons for knowing your bounce rate and exit rate for your web pages.

The first is this allows you to further optimize your website and web pages that have a high rate for one or both of these factors, so you can edit these pages to give the more of a ‘Sticky’ quality and keep your visitors interested in your website and web pages and have them spend more time on your website.

The second important reason is that Google knows your bounce rate and exit rate and uses that as part of its equation when it decides how well to rank your website and web pages

When it comes to online marketing SEO factors Google also knows the length of time a visitor spends on any one page of your site as well as the total time a visitors spends on your entire website and factors this into its ranking decision as well.

AwStats in the control panel of your website will only show you the length of time a visitor spends on your website in segments of: 0 to 30 seconds, 30 seconds to 2 minutes, 2minutes to 5 minutes, etc., but it is a good way to get a feeling for how many visitors are leaving in less than 30 seconds to give you an idea of what your bounce rate is.

Eventually you’ll want to get something like Google analytics installed and understand how to use and interpret the data it gives you but if you’re focused on just getting traffic with a relatively new website you can just check AwStats until you decide it is time to devote some of your online marketing SEO efforts towards learning and using Google Analytics

Online Marketing SEO: To Sum Things Up
So the bottom line is, especially for the bounce rate, to be aware of what it is and how it can have a negative effect upon your web site and you web page rankings in Google as well as tell you that you need to experiment and change something up to reduce it so people will stay interested in staying on your website long enough for you to get your marketing message across.

I didn’t give any real solutions towards the online marketing SEO tactic of making your website ‘Sticky’ to reduce the bounce rate but this post is already rather long so I’ll come back tomorrow with a post on methods to create a ‘Sticky’ website and ‘Sticky’ web pages. More information here:
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