Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of the number of single-visit in your site.
For example, if there are 100 visitors visit your site, and 80 of them leave the site without visiting other pages of that site, then the bounce rate is 80%.
The process can be expressed mathematically as:
Bounce rate = [ (no. of single visit) / (no. of total visit) ] x100
To make it clearer, bounce means the visitors exit the site from the landing page or entrance page itself. If the visitor visit the homepage of this blog and leaves the blog from this page without visiting other pages, then it is already a bounce.
There are actually several ways of leaving your blog that are considered as bounces. Few of these are:
- If your visitors leave your blog through the link from within your blog to the other blogs. For example the visitors click the links in your blogroll listed at the sidebar, or the links within the article to the other blogs or websites that are used as references.
- If your visitors leave your blog through the Adsense ads or any other ads displayed on your blog.
- If your visitors leave your blog by closing the tab or the browser’s window.
- If your visitors leave your blog by clicking the “Back” button of your browser.
- If the visitors open a new website by typing the new URL.
- If your visitors do nothing after landing on your blog. What I mean is that, your blog is opened for a long time.
But what does high bounce rate of my blog really mean to me?
Actually, having a high bounce rate means two things: Either you failed or you succeed. Whether having high bounce rate is good or not depends on your goal in blogging at a particular blog. For example:
- If your blog is made for Adsense, having high bounce rate means two things: (1) your visitors click the Adsense ads; (2) your visitors leave your blog immediately after knowing that your blog is just made for Adsense.
- If your blog is a marketing type, having high bounce rate means two things again: (1) maybe your visitors clicked the ads on your blog; (2) maybe your visitors were not interested in the content of the landing page.
- If your blog has only 1 post, then you’ll be expecting that your blog has high bounce rate, from 80% to 100%. It’s because there’s no other post that your visitors could visit.
Bounce Rate and the SERP
It might be advantageous to you if your blog has high bounce rate especially if the visitors of your blog leave your blog by passing through the Adsense ads because it could mean huge Adsense income for you.
However, bounce rate is already considered by Google as a measure of quality visit and that the high bounce rate indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. And there was an speculations from SEO experts that bounce rate could greatly affect your blog’s ranking on the SERP.
What I mean is that if your blog has high bounce rate, especially in a certain googling or searching, your blog will be outranked by those blogs or websites or webpages that has low bounce rate.
It happens because the main goal of the search engines is to serve the internet users with the relevant search engine result. And one factor considered by the search engine in learning whether your blog is relevant to that certain googling or searching is the bounce rate.
So, how can you decrease the bounce rate of your blog?
Few of the ways that might decrease the bounce rate of your blog are:
- Make your blog user friendly . Your blog should be clean, orderly and appealing to the visitors. The text should be readable and the downloading should be fast.
- Write Quality and Relevant Contents . The articles published at your blog should be interesting and useful. Give your visitors the reason to stay longer at your blog.
- Inter- linking articles . Offer your visitors more articles to read that are relevant to the landing page. This can be done by
(1) linking to the other articles by using the relevant keywords within the article;
(2) by listing few related articles at the bottom of the article. - Proper SEO . In optimizing your blog or every pages of your blog for the search engines, you need to target the keywords that are relevant to the page being optimized.
For example, if your targeting the “Pinay Scandal” keyword, make sure that the landing page contains relevant content because if the content is not related to the keywords used to find a page of your blog, mostlikely your visitors will immediately click the “Back” button of the browser to check for another websites listed at the SERP.
