Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Bounce Rate
24th July 2009 by Kerry Dye
In the fifth part of my series about success metrics for SEO, I am going to be addressing Bounce Rate. First of all, bounce rate needs to be defined.
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who come to your site who view a single page and then leave.
Why is this important? Well, generally, it is considered a good thing if someone comes to your site looks at more than one page. They then become engaged visitors and are more likely to complete a process on your site whether it is buying or requesting more information – or even just bookmarking the site for future use.
From a search engine optimisation point of view, checking on the bounce rate is a way of showing that the visitors that are coming to the site are relevant. If someone looks at a page, and then goes to back to the results page for another site, that is not what the site needs.
When is bounce rate not a good metric?
Sometimes, people manage a task by looking at the single page they landed on. How often have you visited a website just to get their telephone number?
Do search engines look at bounce rate?
Almost certainly. All of the major search engines track clicks through from search pages and use it as a part of their relevancy algorithm. How much of a part of the algorithm this is it is impossible to know.
In Google, it is fairly certain that position changes happen based on this traffic. So if the site at number 5 gets clicked on more than the site at number 4, eventually, they will exchange places, even if nothing else changes on or off-page. This is a good argument for writing compelling meta descriptions that invoke action.
A very good example of this feedback mechanism is when a site gets infected with malware and this is highlighted on the search page. People therefore don’t click on the listing. These sites slide down the rankings over the course of a few days.
So how can we use this as a metric?
As a stand alone metric for measuring SEO success, bounce rate is not particularly useful. However, it can be a useful secondary measurement. Look at the bounce rate overall for the site, and compare it to that for organic traffic – is it better or worse? Do the same for paid versus organic traffic, it can highlight some issues in one or the other that you might want to look into more deeply.
Comparing one site’s bounce rate to another can sometimes be useful, but it is often quite individual to the site. For many sites, a bounce rate of 60% is not unusual, and would not be anything to be overly concerned about unless it changed over time.
One effect of increasing SEO success is that as a site becomes more powerful, it tends to rank for shorter phrases, and these can have a higher bounce rate than long tail phrases because the search is more likely not to match the intent of the searcher.
Earlier parts of this series:
Related Posts
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Page Yield
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Online Mentions
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Traffic from Search Engines
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Rankings
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Conversions
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: The Long Tail
- The secret of success is constancy to purpose – Benjamin Disraeli
- Rankings ARE important for Search Engine Optimisation – For Now