The term “bounce rate” refers to the percentage of visitors who come to your website and then leave without doing anything. More specifically, it refers to those who happen upon a landing page and then navigating away again without clicking on any of your other pages. In this article, we’ll take a look at why this rate matters and what you can do to reduce it.

Why Your Bounce Rate Matters

You may hear that bounce rates play a role in how you rank in Google’s search engine results pages. While the numbers don’t directly affect where you land, they can point toward a deeper issue within your site. If you have a significant number of people coming to your website and then leaving right away, Google may view that as your site isn’t what they need. Should this happen frequently, your ranking could drop over time.

How to Measure Your Bounce Rate

Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, measuring your bounce rate is simple. When you log into your account, you’ll be able to view the numbers for all of your pages. The system calculates those numbers by dividing the number of bounces by the total number of website visitors in a specific period.

How Do You Reduce Your Rate?

If you’re not happy with your bounce rates, there are things that you can do to lower them:

  • Improve the user experience. Make sure that your website works well and makes it easy for visitors to get around. With the number of searches performed on mobile devices increasing, you should also ensure that your site works on portable devices.
  • Tweak traffic sources. You likely have web traffic coming from various sources, including search engines and social media. If you see certain sources have higher bounce rates than others, look at the cause and try to fix it.
  • Engage website visitors. Create a website that engages your visitors. Include content for them to view, such as an interesting blog post to read or a video to watch. The more engaged they are, the more likely they are to look around.

While your bounce rate doesn’t directly affect your rankings in the search results pages, it’s still a critical metric to understand. High rates can point toward a problem within your site, such as user experience issues or that you’re not providing quite what your target audience needs. By figuring out what’s causing high rates, you can take the necessary steps to improve your site and get the results you want.