Joel Pinkham

Bounce rate will impact your search rankings. We can never be certain about how search engines rank pages – but here’s my logic on this…

The problem with most SEO’s is that they are focussed on getting rankings. Sometimes the easiest way to get rankings is using ‘techniques’. More and more often though I see search results rankings that can not be explained by SEO techniques. Inbound links, title tags and good quality content are of course important, but certainly not the be all and end all.

Let’s take a step back here.

What is the point of a search engine?
To help a person find the information they are looking for.

So, when a user types something in they want to find something related to what they typed in.

What is the point of a search engine ranking sites?
To help a person find the best possible information for what they are looking for.

So logically the order of search results should show the best site, with the best content, and the most relevant to a persons search words.

OK, that’s obvious – what’s my point?
The best site has content that the person wants and is easy for them to get.

The trouble is that Google is not a person. It’s pretty close, but at the end of the day it’s an algorithm. It needs to a way to logically determine which site is best.

To measure this best factor Google is going to use a bunch of things to determine a web pages score. User experience is of course a huge factor if a human was going to score a website. Google can’t tell a good design, or if something is interactive and capitvating for people viewing. What they can measure though, is the bounce rate* of a site.

It’s a dead give away to search engines that your site didn’t match the users expectations, why else would they be leaving.

My advice is to always think about users first and search engines should be kept happy naturally.

*Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after seeing just one page. For example, 100 people visit your homepage, and 25 of them decide to leave without viewing any other pages. This would mean you have a bounce rate of 25%