Is high bounce rate bad for SEO?

[laurence]

I am hearing that if my site has high bounce rate then it can decrease rankings my site on SERPs, is that true? if so, why?

Your suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[SEOPub]

I have never found a correlation between the bounce rate reported in Analytics and rankings.

Hell, in some cases a high bounce rate is actually a good signal. It could mean visitors are going right to where you are directing them.

 

[Mark007]

Bounce rate is the measure of how fast the visitors are entering your domain and leaving without spending much time on your website. A quick departure will always increase the bounce rate of your website which can be verified through Google analytics. There are various criteria that you need to work out to keep your visitors stay on your website longer and hence help reduce the bounce rate of your website. Reducing the bounce rate will help increase your website popularity in search results.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Everything about this post is wrong. Bounce rate does not help to increase your website popularity in search results and bounce rate has nothing to do with the speed at which a visitor leaves your website. Bounce rate is a measure of how often someone leaves your site without visiting additional pages. It doesn't matter if they do that in 3 seconds or 3 minutes. It is still a bounce.

 

[RDO Servers]

RDO Servers

That is correct. Bounce rate is about wither or not they visited any other pages on your site, it has nothing to do with time or your search results.

It's importance depends on how your site is laid out.

If you have a 1 page site, or the landing page has all of the important signup/subscribe/purchase info on it, without the need for a customer to click a link and visit another page, then the bounce rate is irrelevant.

However, if your customer hit your landing page, but your hoping they will follow links to your product pages, read other articles, click for more info, etc, then a high bounce rate is a bad thing. It means people are looking at your landing page and leaving without going any further.

 

[kevinarndale]

It is a general idea that a high bounce rate is a bad thing for your website. But it could also mean that visitors who have visited your pages have exactly found what they were looking for and have left completely satisfied. You should check the average time spent by visitors on your website through Google Analytics and then decide whether it is right or wrong for you. You can however, tie down your visitors with some interactive stuff like a video, or a poll or suggestions on how to improve the content/page/site.
The exit rate is also to be considered in this case.
Check this out from Google [URLnf="https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2525491?hl=en"]here[/URLnf]

 

[emilylynch]

The high bounce rate is a signal that your web design and the content writing requires a little more improvement. Often people leaves a site suddenly on two cases, either they have found the right answer or they doesn't seen any relevant answer to their search query. When they found the answer, they will not return back to the search results and obviously your bounce will not become high. however when they didn't find the relevant content or the content they found is not engaging, they will look out for the other search results. obviously this will cost a higher bounce rate. The important thing you should consider when you are having higher bounce rate is whether you are getting traffic from right users. If you have focused on a wrong keyword, obviously there will be users with the expectation of something and what they get will be different. The key factor here is to choose the right keyword for your website.

 

[kian.j]

kian.j

I agree. You don't know exactly why people are leaving your site. They might have or might have not found what they were looking for. Nevertheless, it woun't hurt you to improve the content of your site. Maybe think also about changing the keywords - there's a possibility that your website comes up in the search results that it shouldn't come up in.

 

[elcidofaguy]

There seems to be some confusion here between "SERP Bounce Rate" and "Website/Traffic Bounce Rate"... Its two completely different things...

SERP bounce rate is when a user clicks on your website from search engine results and return back to search with continuing to look/find a website which satisfies a users query...

Website bounce rate relates to how long a user is on your webpage/site...

Within the SEO community there is certainly some debate as to SERP bounce rate and its impact to rankings... One thing for sure Google has the data i.e. they know what you typed for search, what you clicked and whether you returned and continued with searching for the same thing... Its reasonable to assume that they use this as part of the algo with assessing the quality of a website in relation to a keyword... In my opinion SERP bounce rate is part of G's algo with being one of the many factors used to assess rankings...

 

[wellwisher]

Yes, bounce rate affects SEO of a website to greater extent. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who view only one page of your website and then leave the website.

Bounce rate over 70% is considered a high bounce rate, and a high bounce rate is bad.
Bounce rates under 50% are generally considered very good bounce rates indeed.
Bounce rates as low as 40% or 30% are pretty spectacularly awesome.

Most sites experience bounce rates between 50% and 60%, and these are considered perfectly fine bounce rates. It’s always a good idea to continually improve your site to reduce bounce rates, but you generally should not be alarmed at bounce rates in the 50% – 60% range.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Please show proof of that. Nobody has ever published any evidence that anything you are saying is true.