If you have done any research into SEO or discussed it when employing a Perth SEO agency, you may have come across the term “bounce rate”. Nothing to do with trampolines, it is a term that may at first seem rather simplistic, but unfortunately for many website owners, it is also something that can cause them a large amount of consternation.
Bounce rate, when being applied within SEO, is a metric that measures how quickly a visitor to a website leaves it after landing there. Consider it the online equivalent of you walking into a restaurant talking a quick look around and deciding to walk straight back out again. That is not good news for the restaurant, and for a website owner, it paints a dark picture too, especially as it can have negative consequences for their SEO.
The reason for that is much to do with Google’s obsession with user experience, or UX. UX is top of Google’s priorities because it is a measure they use to try to ensure they remain, not just the most visited search engine on the internet but the most website. They want anyone who searches on their search engine to find as close to what they were looking for having clicked on one of the results Google serves up.
Google has several ways of evaluating the experience a visitor has, and the bounce rate is one of them. If it finds that people are clicking through to one of the websites it has given a high ranking, but the majority of them are leaving that website again almost immediately, it throws up a red flag. It suggests that the website is not worthy of a high ranking and thus Google moves it down, and worse still, down to a lower page.