All Entries Tagged With: "bounce rates"

Why Your Site’s Bounce Rate Is Important For Rankings

Blogs are at a disadvantage in one regard: Traditionally, they have high bounce rates. That’s because readers generally read one post and they’re gone. This is especially true of subscribers.

But that may not matter in the long run even though bounce rates are important for ranking purposes. This isn’t proven, but I believe it’s true. Google has stated publicly that they measure traffic and rank websites based on traffic. But a high traffic site may not necessarily be of any value any more than a low traffic site with a low bounce rate. All things considered, a high traffic site with a high bounce rate may actually be holding a negative, not a positive.

Consider this: A site receives 100,000 daily visitors on a regular basis. 80% of those visitors are unique and 80% of those read one page and they’re gone, never to return. Would you want that? Or would you prefer to have 1,000 daily visitors of which 80% are loyal and return on a regular basis? I think we’d all rather have the latter, right?

Particularly if your site is a blog. You want readers coming back.

A loyal readership is much more valuable than high numbers of people that show up and leave. But I do believe that your site’s bounce rate may be an indicator of user value in the eyes of at least one search engine. Work on creating valuable content and your bounce rate will go down. You might even see a resulting increase in search ranking for some of your keywords.