A few years ago, when the SEO community first discovered that Google was using bounce rates to determine relevancy, webmasters were in a panic trying to figure out how to lower their bounce rates. But is having a high bounce rate really bad? In this article, I show you which high bounce rates are good and which high bounce rates you should be worried about.

What Is A Bounce Rate?

According to Google, bounce rate is the percentage of visits where only one page is viewed before a person leaves your website.

A high bounce rate is often considered bad because it might indicate that a person came to your website, didn't find what they were looking for, and left right away. But there are bounces that are good.

More often than not, visitors are searching for one thing. And if your page answers their questions, solves their problem, or gives them all of the information that they are looking for, then a visitor might leave your website completely satisfied without navigating to other pages. This is an example of a good bounce.

As a result, to differentiate between good and bad bounce rates, you should consider how long visitors stay on each page.

Using "Average Time On Page" To Find Bad Bounce Rates

The Average Time On Page statistic tells you how long visitors stay on a page before browsing to other pages or leaving your website. This statistic is a better indicator of quality content and relevance than bounce rate because even if the bounce rate is high, it lets you know whether or not visitors are reading the page before they leave.

Good High Bounce Rates

If a page has a high Bounce Rate, yet the Average Time On Page shows that visitors are taking the time to read the page, then you should not be concerned about the high bounce rate because visitors are obviously reading the content and finding it relevant and useful.

Bad High Bounce Rates

If a page has a high Bounce Rate and the Average Time On Page is close to 0, this is a bad bounce. Visitors are not staying on your website and they are not reading your content. You should figure out ways to make that page more appealing.

How Can You Minimize Bad Bounce Rates?

It is easy to minimize bad bounce rates. Here are some tips.

1. Evaluate page content and make sure that it is well-written and matches what visitors expect to find after reading the headline or title of the page.

2. Make pages more appealing by reducing excessive advertisements and fixing other unsightly features.

3. Determine whether your website looks trustworthy and professional. In today's world of beautiful user-friendly websites, many visitors quickly leave sites that look amateur.

4. Open external links in a new window. If you link to a lot of external website or embed advertisements, sometimes visitors will click these links and leave your website. Use target="_blank" where possible to give visitors the chance to stay on your site.

5. Split up long articles into separate pages. Sometimes visitors are intimidated by the possibility of reading large amounts of content. Don't overwhelm them.

6. If using paid marketing campaigns, make sure that your page targets the right keywords so that visitors expectations are satisfied.

7. Improve load time. The quickest way to turn a visitor away is to have a slow-loading website.

8. Make your website sticky by proving easy access to related content.

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hmm

Nice One Op! Beautiful Analysis!

That number 2 upsets me alot. How can you decorate your web pages with lots of advertisements, like Masquerade.

Number 7, is the reason I love Nairaland!

ok

My website www.toptrendlists.in has been waiting for Adsense approval for a month now

Not really sha. But it's not the best

Very true and brilliant

informative

Please what about high bang rate?

Food for bloggers to consume. Anyway, I think it is educative and informative.

Very bad.
Bad content.
Wrong back links.
These are most times the reasons.

Sometimes it's your inability to pass your message across quickly on your articles or post.

People have low attention span when it comes to internet. Too many information all at once.

If you have 50% bounce rate, I think it's not bad.

Comments are also a good way to get feedback.

I'm still trying to reduce bounce rate too. Trying hard. Purpose of the blog is good but trying to find a better way to communicate to my readers so as to keep bounce rate low.

Check www.HRtechnique.com and give me feedback folks.

Google believes your site should have good content to he able to keep people and to navigate to other section , high bounce rate is bad for a website. There are few tricks to reducing it.

1. Write interesting contents
2. Use images
3. Make your site easy to navigate

For more kindly call let's media concept for web design and online branding

Contact www.leksmediaconcept.com for your web design and digital marketing services

VickyRotex:
Nice One Op! Beautiful Analysis!

That number 2 upsets me alot. How can you decorate your web pages with lots of advertisements, like Masquerade.

Number 7, is the reason I love Nairaland!

Yes ooo

You have nailed it

konjinus:
My website www.toptrendlists.in has been waiting for Adsense approval for a month now

Is the thread about adsense?

leksmedia:
Google believes your site should have goof content to he able to keep people and to navigate to other section , high bounce rate is bad for a website. There are few tricks to reducing it.

1. Write interesting contents
2. Use images
3. Make your site easy to navigate

For more kindly call let's media concept for web design and online branding

Lovely

NaijaRealist:
Food for bloggers to consume. Anyway, I think it is educative and informative.

Yes ooooo

A high bounce rate is more or less irrelevant (especially depending on your content).

Imagine if someone makes a search for "zip code of Surulere".

Once he lands on a page, he's going to grab the zip code, in less than 5 seconds, and "bounce".

He is not expected to explore further within the site to find other zip codes.

He's already gotten what he wants.

And Google understands this.

The type of bounce that's bad for you is if the person immediately returns to Google to click on another search result (bounce to SERP). This gives them feedback that your page didn't deliver the goods.

Nice one. Thanks for sharing.

konjinus:
My website www.toptrendlists.in has been waiting for Adsense approval for a month now

A month. That is prospeterous. Have u been able to place ads code on theel blog

www.nomadicnegro.com is mine.

experts please help me look at those my very loooong writeups. hope they won't overbounce readers.

quite insightful not just to website owners but also visitors. We now know how to help your ministry move forward.

@Lalasticlala should be here.

Let others too know how to help our brothers reduce there bounce rate.

not bad