This is one of the most common questions that marketers often debate about, and the answer is often YES and NO depend on what content that you look into. Let me explain:
We often hear about the term “bounce rate” from the agencies, and usually starting with sometimes like “the higher bounce rate” then the bad your site is and consequently this might affect to your SEO, so after heading that from them boom you got panicked, you are worried and don’t know what to do so them you take out your credit card and pass it to them and then, you got hooked and tricked by these evil magicians! This is definitely a common real story!
The Bounce Rate Myth
Before we get into the conclusion, first you need to understand the concept of bounce rate and why does it exist. According to Google, it defines bounce rate “as a percentage which a person leaves your site from the landing page without further interact to the page”, so basically from here, a bounce rate serves as a sole purpose of measuring whether a customer finds your page relevant to their search result or NOT, and which leads a common misconception that people often interpret this as “the higher bounce rate the worse the page is”, which is not absolutely TRUE, and it will NOT directly affect to your SEO status just because you have a higher bounce rate. As we all know different industries and content might have their benchmarked rate, so let’s say common blog sites usually have a bounce rate between 70%-90% and the content sites usually are between 40%-60%, so does it mean that blog sites are commonly have lower SEO ranking than the content site? I don’t think so Google is THAT stupid.
Common ways to decrease the bounce rate
The reason why Google is invented this measure is they need a certain way to understand the behavior our customers/ readers to interact with the page, the higher the rate that we interact, then it means the SERPs is correlated to the search term that we typed, that is the idea behind that, however, there are certain practices such as like us implementing banner, CTA, videos or even a pop up to sort of attracting the customers to conduct actions, and such actions will prevent the customers to jump out the page, and hence we called this practice “an optimization for lower bounce rate” since customers will force to interact the page, but in reality that does not mean that the customers actually”LOVE” the page or find the page relevant. In addition, since each landing page might have their own purpose, sometimes, having a high bounce rate does not really mean the page it’s bad, you will need more profound analysis in order to interpret whether your high bounce rate is actually bad/good for your site.
A better measurement for page relevancy?
That’s why lots of companies also use the “dwell time” measurement, which I find much relevant than bounce rate, this measurement is generally measuring the three criteria:
1) Session duration
2) CTR of the page on SERP
3) Bounce rate
I guess this might be much more prevalent in terms of measuring whether your page is interactive and relevant to your clients instead of just focusing on Bounce Rate, alright that is it and now since the lunchtime is finished and I will have to get back to my cubicle. Ciao!