Google has recently released information about the use of bounce rate as a ranking factor, but does Google use this metric as part of its ranking algorithm?
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who navigate away from a website after viewing only one page.
Your website bounce rate can easily be found in Google Analytics under the Audience overview section, as shown in the image below:
In practice, having a lower bounce rate means that visitors of your site are viewing more pages. This, however, depends on your site and what your goals are; for example, if your goal is to improve the number of pages a user visits when they are on your site, you want to have a lower bounce rate. Conversely, if you have smaller site that has single page like a blog, having a high bounce rate is perfectly normal.
In June, Google’s John Mueller officially confirmed that bounce rate wasn’t a factor used for rankings on the search engine. However, bounce rate can be an indicator of issues with other Google ranking factors such as page speed and performance, website design and user experience on mobile. Bounce rate can be linked with user experience, which is becoming even more important with it being key to Google’s new Core Web Vitals.
Even though bounce rate is not used as a Google ranking factor, tracking your bounce rate is still a good idea as it can provide a clue as to whether you have effective content on your website, and lowering it usually suggests your content is useful to your target market.
At Engage Web, we offer search engine optimisation services to businesses that want to improve the number of visitors to their website. To find out more, give us a call and speak with our team.
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