have you ever heard the term "bounce rate" but don't understand what it refers to? Well, it's time you knew what it means because knowing what it is, why it occurs and how we can improve it will make our website more successful among users and help us with the SEO positioning of our brand on Google. Would you like to know more? Read on!
Definition of bounce rate
The bounce rate is a metric that shows how many users leave and enter your website without consulting any other page or without clicking on any button or link on the homepage, i.e. how many people leave and enter the website from the same place they came in without having consulted any other option.
It is independent of this how long they spend reading that page, whether they spend one minute or 10, if they only stay on the main page of our website and do not go any further, the bounce rate or percentage will be the same.
This aspect directly influences the SEO positioning that we have discussed in other posts on occasion and that, therefore, is related to Google, which is the main search engine in which our website will be positioned.
Para entender esto, podemos partir de la base de que Google no es capaz de saber qué es lo que hay dentro de una página web, ni el contenido que hemos escrito en ella y mucho menos si este se encuentra redactado en español, ya que Google está desarrollado en inglés. Por tanto, Google no puede saber si el contenido de una plataforma es de mayor o de menor calidad, sino que utiliza a los usuarios para determinar el valor y la calidad de la página web. Por ejemplo, si permanecemos más tiempo en un página web y no salimos nada más entrar, esto le indicará a Google que el contenido que aparece ahí gusta a los usuarios y por tanto empezará a posicionarla más arriba o, al menos, a mantenerlo en la posición en la que se encontraba en un principio. Si, por el contrario, los usuarios salen de nuestra página web nada más entrar, esto le indicará a Google que no contiene términos relacionados con la búsqueda que se ha realizado, y comenzará a bajarla en la lista y hará aumentar nuestro porcentaje de
In fact, currently, and in relation to what we have just mentioned, we are starting to talk about a metric called Dwell Time. With this metric, Google calculates the number of pages it can show us through the interaction we make with it. For its study, it uses other metrics such as CTR (number of clicks a link receives), the duration of the user's session on the website and also, of course, the bounce time.
how does the bounce rate affect my website?
As we mentioned at the beginning of the post, the bounce rate is closely related to SEO positioning. Depending on the bounce rate we have, Google will position us higher or lower when someone searches for terms related to our website.
For example: If we have a digital marketing blog, when users type "digital marketing" in Google, we will appear among the top links. However, if after entering our blog the user leaves again without clicking on any post or accessing any external link, the bounce rate will begin to be created. Each time a user does this with our website, the bounce rate will increase and then Google will start to lower the link to our blog when someone searches for a related term, thus worsening our SEO positioning. Moreover, this will be a bad impact for our website because, according to many studies, 75% of people click only on the first three results that appear on Google and only 15% go to look at the second page of results. Therefore, the lower we appear on Google, the less visibility we give to our company and the harder it will be for us to get benefits.
Therefore, it is important that our bounce rate is not bad, however, sometimes it is not up to us. As Duane Forrester, an expert in SEO positioning said: "Although you may have put all your effort and love into creating the content of a website, the quality of it can only be determined by the eye of the visitor". And the phrase could not be more accurate since, how you rank in Google will be determined by the time that users spend on your website.
I imagine that at this point you may be asking yourself, "But, can I do anything to 'fix' my bounce rate? Although this will depend on the consumer and not on your brand, there are some tools that can help us to improve it.
How to improve bounce rate
The first thing to mention once we've got this far is that there is no one right bounce rate. That is, depending on whether it's a blog, a purely commercial website or an online newspaper (for example), the bounce rate will be different and it doesn't mean that it's better or worse. Depending on what the users who visit us require, our bounce rate will vary.
To find out what our bounce rate is and therefore, whether we should improve it or not, we must enter Google Analytics and consult the bounce rate of both our website and the subpages that make it up, if we have them.
Once we have consulted it, we are going to mention a series of tools that can help us to correct our bounce rate in case we have to do it:
- Determine time limit to cancel the "bounce effect": this option consists of determining that, in order to be considered a visit to our website, the user must spend, for example, 30 seconds on it. In this way we will ensure that even if the user only spends one minute on our website without consulting anything further, the time spent on it counts as a visit and that if the user leaves after 40 seconds of being on it, it is not considered a bounce.
- Establish a time limit and a "scroll" event to cancel the bounce: This means that when the user spends more than, for example, 15 seconds on our web page and scrolls down the screen, it is considered a visit to our web page even if he/she does not visit any other resource on our website.
Either of these two tasks can be modified from our Google Analytics and will allow us to improve our bounce rate and ensure that it does not influence our SEO positioning, as well as ensuring that our website does not lose visibility. And you, what are you waiting for to enter Analytics and correct the bounce rate of your brand?
