7 Dead Simple Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

Is a high bounce rate bad? The answer is: it depends, but yes, sometimes it can be. Is a high bounce rate bad for SEO? That’s where it gets a little more complicated. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus gives you seven easy SEO tips to address your bounce rate, and increase engagement and satisfaction to make your users happier.

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Video Transcription

Welcome, Moz fans, to a new edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re talking about bounce rate, specifically seven dead simple tips to reduce your bounce rate.

So most of you already know what bounce rate is. But for those who are uninitiated, bounce rate is an analytics term. It simply means a single page or non-interaction visit. When a visitor comes from Google or another website and they visit one page, they have no interaction, and they leave, that’s considered a bounce. That is a high bounce rate.

So is bounce rate bad? That’s a common question. The answer is, yeah, it can be bad. For example, if everybody is coming to your homepage and you want to get them to your sales page or your checkout page, you don’t want a high bounce rate. In that situation, yes, bounce rate is definitely bad. But is bounce rate bad for SEO? Well, there it gets a little more complicated.

Now, to be clear, Google does not use bounce rate. It is not a ranking signal for Google. That said, we do know that there’s a lot of evidence that Google does use some sort of engagement signals for SEO that we don’t have access to. So in that way you can think of bounce rate as a proxy signal for engagement and satisfaction, and that’s really what we’re trying to measure here. We’re trying to measure how satisfied our uses are, how engaged they are with a page. In some instances, there is evidence that this could help your SEO in some circumstances.

Now just lowering your bounce rate is not going to automatically improve your Google rankings. It doesn’t work that way. But lowering your bounce rate can have positive effects. In fact, your visitors may be more satisfied.

Now to be clear, before we get into these tips, I want to be very clear the goal is not to reduce your bounce rate number. It’s just a number. It doesn’t mean anything. The goal is to increase engagement and to increase satisfaction, to make your users happier. Just reducing your bounce rate, that doesn’t do anything. But if you make your users happier, give them what they’re searching for, that’s what we’re trying to do, and we’re using bounce rate as a proxy to measure that along with other metrics, such as time on site, the number of pages visited, and things like that.