09/30/2013 // submit Blog // Submit Press Release 123 // (press release)
You might have done all the tedious quality control and processes to keep your website content at par with your competitors but you might have missed one very crucial aspect that can affect the future of your search ranking – your website’s bounce rate.
Before we’ll delve in on how your bounce rate can affect your search ranking, let’s discuss first its basics for the sake of those ones who are not that familiar yet with this online traffic metric.
What is a Bounce Rate?
It is simply a metric used by Google to measure your site visitor’s engagement. The higher your bounce rate the lower your site engagement. For example, a visitor comes in your site and spends only a fraction of second before he closes your page – this activity entails a very high bounce rate. (Note: A very high bounce rate is a warning sign that there’s something wrong with your webpage.)
Bounce Rate is computed using this formula: Rb = Tv/Te
Rb – Bounce Rate
Tv – Total Number of Visitors Viewing One Page Only
Te – Total Entries to Page
In Google’s term, below is the simple definition of a bounce rate.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site.
How Bounce Rate Affects Your Site’s Search Rankings?
As previously mentioned, a bounce rate is a reflection on how engaging your contents are. Lower bounce rate score indicates more engaging contents, thus you can tell that your content development strategy is effective. But, what are the direct instances your bounce rate affects your website’s search rankings?
Google Search is now relying more and more on their Google Analytics tool to check your website’s performance. That means your bounce rate is already part of the overall metrics on how Google ranks your site in the search engine result pages (SERPs). A high bounce rate is one of the indicators of poor quality content or lousy page design, one of the reasons your visitors would immediately leave your webpage.
Poor content, lousy web design and intrusive navigational add-ons are just some of the factors that trigger high bounce rates, thus decreasing the chances of getting high ranking in the SERPs.
Tips on improving your Website’s Bounce Rate
Improving your website’s bounce rate should always be a part of your ongoing search engine optimization plan. Below are some helpful tips on how to oomph it.
1. Create Interesting Article Series – It is not enough to create one compelling article. To keep your readers more engaged and to improve your site’s bounce rate, launch an article series wherein you publish each part of the article every two days or every week. This way, when a visitor found your webpage, he or she will be compelled to click on the next series and to read everything that you featured on that topic.
2. Encourage Interactions through Commenting and Liking – Do you reply to your readers’ comments on your articles? If you don’t then this is the best time to start checking on those comments and make a reply. Readers are more inclined to leave lots of comments if the author of the article tends to value their opinions. Also, a fave or rating buttons on top or at the bottom of your article can also be useful in tracking the efficacy of your content.
3. Use the Related Posts plugin – If you’re using WordPress CMS, it is very easy to install a plugin that would display links to all articles on your site with topics that are closely related to your posts. This would prompt readers that they can learn more about the topic being featured by checking on those related posts.
4. Lessen Outbound Links on your posts – It is also advisable to as much as possible minimize the number of outbound links on your post. But, if your post really needs those outbound links for reference purposes, it is recommended that you create a page for each outbound link and you can put the actual link on that page.
5. Use the Open in New Window attribute in all the links on your posts – To avoid the instances of a visitor leaving your webpage in less period of time, you can change the attribute of all your links to Open in New Window. That way even though they visit your other pages, they can still easily go back to the original page that they visited.
Keep in mind that your site’s bounce rate can possibly cripple your search rankings. Thus, it is of utmost importance to always monitor and keep its score at least below 50%. Ongoing on- page optimization that improves your bounce rate score is a must if you are not willing to be left out by your competitors.
By: Qamar Zaman – Chief Technical Officer at Submit Press Release 123
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