How improving your bounce rate can boost your SEO

Improving your bounce rate (the percentage of people who only visit one page on your site and then leave) is a great way to improve your website performance and make sure people are hanging around and interacting with your content. But there’s also another happy side effect of lowering your bounce rate: the same tasks can also add to your SEO efforts.

Start with your analytics

Instead of looking at your overall bounce rate, go to the individual pages on your site on Google Analytics via Behaviour -> Site Content -> All Pages. You can then see which are your most popular pages, with the highest bounce rates. If you improve the content on those pages first and provide internal links both to and from them, you’ll encourage people to stick around and look at more of your site. And internal linking is also a very good way to improve your SEO.

Your website design

If your site is very busy with flashing ads, multiple pop-ups and other distractions, it’s likely your potential audience will be put off and choose to go to a competitor instead. Anything that distracts your audience from being able to find the information they want or anything that makes it hard for them to navigate your site is going to have a poor effect on your bounce rate.

Take a look at your site from the point of view of your visitors and ensure it’s well-designed, easy to read with plenty of white space, easy to navigate and designed with the user in mind. You should also ensure that you have highly-relevant, to the point content above the fold that’s well-keyworded.

Once you have a clear site that’s designed to attract your ideal clients, with the right, highly-targeted content, you will improve your bounce rate and your SEO.

How quickly does your site load?

With attention spans as short as they are, if your website takes far too long to load, your potential audience won’t wait. They’ll simply click away and look for their information and possible purchases elsewhere.

Your website hosting can make a great deal of difference to your site speed and load time, so ensure you choose a good host, as not only can you improve your bounce rate, but Google is now using site speed as a ranking factor – improve your speed and you could also improve your position in the search engines.

Improving your bounce rate might seem like yet another task to add to your ‘to do’ list, but consistent improvements to your bounce rate can improve your ranking in the SERPS, attract more engaged visitors and improve your bottom line.