Improving The Bounce Rate

It is the percentage of visitors who leave the site after having consulted a page, therefore which does not wish to consult another of them. This parameter is essential to know what the visitors think of your site.

An example, the Anaa.eu site

Here are the statistics of the site Anaa.eu, an Ajax framework: bounce rate of 18% and average time on site of 6 minutes.

A bounce rate of 18% can be described as satisfactory on a site where each page provides complete information: visitors having obtained information, want nevertheless to read more pages.

The bounce rate must be evaluated by associating it the time on site: if the bounce rate is low but visitors spend also few time on the site, that would mean that the visitors do not find what they are searching and go quickly from one page to the other. The longer the time on site is and the more a low bounce rate has a positive meaning.

The percentage of new visits is in connection with the percentage of visits brought by search engines: those bring new visitors while referrals and bookmarks bring more often same ones. It is also in connection with the expansion of the visits. Its interpretation thus depends on lot of external factors.
This factor supplements that of the bounce rate, it is better that it is weak if the bounce rate is high, that indicates visitors found relevant information even if they read only one page.

Bounce rate and search engines

When Google for example knows the bounce rate of a site, does it make use of this factor it in his results or do it penalize the site according to whether the rate is low or high? Does it estimate that a site of which few pages are visited is not useful, and thus does it inflict penalties to it?
According to some SEO experts, a high rate indicates a lack of relevance and is thus negative. It is the point of view of a search engine.
If a website has a raised rate, higher than 65%, the webmaster would not use Google Analytics, which directly provides the information to Google!
However the bounce rate can be known also from clicks in results of queries. One cannot hide it in Google, one can only try to improve it!
About the question of the use of statistics from Google Analytics by Google, I will answer at bottom of the page with an external link.

Factors for a lower bounce rate

To reduce the rate and thus to keep visitors on the site, the following factors are essential:

1. Design.
   A pleasant presentation encourages to visit the site.
2. Loading time.
   On a site whose pages take a long time to appear one is incited neither to continue, nor to return. The use of a CMS must be associated to a quality hosting that has reactive databases.
3. Interest.
   When a text is interesting, in good English and without spelling mistakes, one will want to see what the author has written again.
4. Size of the contents.
   Short articles incite to read other pages (but complete texts are more lucky to obtain backlinks and thus new visits). A low rate obtained by shorter articles is only useful if one wants show statistics to others.
5. External links and publicities.
   If the visitor clicks on a link or a publicity, it is lost for the site (temporarily). Pages full of publicities at 1 cent the click are thus to proscribe. See the Adsense tutorial about this subject.
   Links on external sites are essential and a factor of better position in results of search engines, just avoid those which are not relevant.
6. Adapting keywords.
   The main factor of bounce is the fact that a page on which one arrives does not correspond to what one search on the engine. It is so necessary to select keywords which are more appropriate for the contents. See the article a site of quality for how to put keywords in a web page.
7. Some sites as dictionaries for example should have high bounce rate and this is not significant for the relevance of pages. But it may be improved with internal links.
   

External links

Google bounce factor and research

The conclusion of this article is: yes, Google uses the bounce rate to penalize sites and even it makes use of the data from Google Analytics. But if the article is studied in detail more, one may doubt his statistics. 100 users on a site without activity does not mean anything, that can be only the arrival of these visitors for the experiment which modifies the results. Moreover the author of the article proved to be related to a competitor supplier of statistics.
As counterexample, about the Anaa.eu site, its so low bounce rate did not have any effect on the results of Google one month after Google Analytics was installed.