Two Minute Read

Keeping visitor engagement high should be of paramount importance to anyone with a website. People engaging with what your website has to offer means there’s a greater chance of converting them from a visitor to a potentially recurring paying customer. That’s not all engagement can do for you though - although Google hasn’t confirmed it, there’s sufficient evidence to suggest that having greater engagement stops you from plummeting down the rankings.This is all due to the ‘bounce rate’ of your website. The bounce rate is defined by seohermit as ‘when a searcher uses Google to find your site via specific keyword searches and, upon clicking your Google listing for said keywords, immediately (or within a specific time frame that isn’t defined by Google) clicks the “back” button on his/her browser, thus taking the searcher back to the Google listings.’ Quite simply, it’s how long someone spends on your website after having searched for it - or something similar.So why does this matter to Google? Surely if a website is bringing in traffic in the first place, then it’s good, right? Well, no - there’s more to it than that.These days, more than ever, Google is focusing on assisting with, or resolving, visitors’ queries. It’s not enough to just have a high keyword density anymore - Google has gone beyond that. Now, when you type something into Google, the search engine will try and direct you to what it believes to be the best solution to your query. That’s where ‘bouncing’ comes in. If a website is at the top of Google thanks to its keyword and SEO usage, then that’s great - but if Google sees that the vast majority of people are leaving the website almost as soon as they click on it, then the natural response is for Google to believe that website didn’t have what they wanted and send it back down the rankings to be replaced with a more suitable one.

This study performed by Wordstream reinforces the notion that high bounce rates correlate to a lower position on the Google rankings. So the takeaway from all this is simple - lower your bounce rate to improve your ranking!

If your website has a high bounce rate or you need someone to help you optimise it for SEO, contact us on 01189 100 012 or email hello@digity.co.uk.
References
Seohermit - https://www.seohermit.com/articles/what-bounce-rate-means-for-your-seo-strategy/ Wordstream - https://moz.com/blog/do-website-engagement-rates-impact-organic-rankings