Hello, this is John Locke. Today we're going to talk about bounce rate: is it a
ranking factor or not? Before we get in to today's discussion,
let's talk about what bounce rate is. When it comes to SEO, bounce rate is when
somebody comes to a page on your website, and they visit no other pages on your
website, and then they leave. It's a single page user session on your website.
If you had 10 people that came to a page on your website, and all 10 of them only
went to that one page, and they didn't visit any other page on your website, and then
they left and went to somewhere else on the internet -- that would be a 100
percent bounce rate. If five of those ten people instead visited another page on
your website, after they visited the page that they came in on, that would be a 50
percent bounce rate...and so on. So most SEO consultants believe that bounce rate
has something to do with SEO, and a low bounce rate is better than a high bounce rate. We're going to
look at some reasons why and why not bounce rate would be a factor in SEO, and
what I actually think is the reality. So, the most compelling reason that people
give for low bounce rate being a [positive] SEO factor, is that for one, it is featured
very prominently in Google Analytics. If you hook up your site to Google
Analytics, you're going to see that bounce rate is one of the main metrics, right
there front and center, as a sign of a metric that you should be tracking.
The conventional wisdom says that the lower your bounce rate, the more
satisfied people are with that page. [The correlation being], it's the content on the page. If
they visit other pages on the site, that means that they were happy with what
they found on the page that they came in on. And so, they're going to check out the
rest of the website. A lot of things go into having a low bounce rate in my opinion.
Those include having a good design, having good user experience. You
absolutely have to have great content, and satisfy the searcher intent of what
they came in to find. Overall, a low bounce rate is seen as a sign of a high
quality page and a high quality website. Now, let's look at all the reasons why bounce
rate would not be a factor in SEO. In April of 2017, Google representative
Gary Illyes, when asked directly if bounce rate was a ranking factor, said that bounce
rate "is not a good signal". Now, notice he didn't say that Google does not use bounce rate
at all. I would advise people who use what Google representatives say as proof of
factual evidence -- a lot of times it comes down to what they're not saying. You
have to read between the lines sometimes, because they can't just tell you the
exact things that they're using, because people will then try and manipulate the
system. So they [Google and their representatives] can't exactly tell you straight up what they're using. But, he
did say that it's not a great signal. "It's not a good signal" were his exact
words. So why would [a low] bounce rate not be a good signal for ranking a page higher? T
The first thing that comes to my mind is, let's say that you're a competitor of
mine, and I want to rank my page above yours. Your page is above mine, and I want to
move my page above yours. What's a way that I could make your page lower? If bounce
rate was a major ranking factor? Well for one, what I could do is go on Fiverr or
go on Amazon Mechanical Turk and hire a whole bunch of people to do a search -- the
specific search I'm looking for -- and then when your result comes up, they click on
it, and then they bounce out. They leave after just going to that one page. Now, if
bounce rate was a major ranking factor, then those actions alone should be
enough to do a negative SEO attack on your page. For that reason alone, I don't
think that bounce rate is a major ranking factor -- at all. Because it's too
easy to manipulate in both in a positive and a negative way. It's too easy to
manipulate that, just by hiring people from developing countries to go and
either click on your result, and then go to a whole bunch of different pages, or
go to your competitor's results and bounce out. But here's what I do think happens.
I do think that bounce rate works in certain contexts, and not in others. And
I'm going to explain what I mean. I think that bounce rate works in
conjunction with searcher intent. The context of the bounce rate is going to
make a difference. I'm going to give you some examples of where a
high bounce rate is not going to affect your pages rank negatively in any way.
Example One would be a contact page. Let's say that someone is googling the
contact information for your company. They want to get your phone number, your
email address, your physical location, or they want to send you a message. If they
get this information, and then they go on their merry way, and they bounce out,
that's not going to hurt your rank for that page, because people are getting
exactly what they came there for. Similarly, if people are searching for an
answer to a question, and you have a long form piece of content that answers it
in-depth, and it's presented in a way that's pleasing, and it's easy for them
to digest and understand, then if you have a high bounce rate on that page, I
don't believe that it's going to hurt your ranking in any way, shape, or form.
I'm going to throw some anecdotal evidence out there to suggest this [is true]. The
top 20 pages on my own site all have the bounce rate between 76% and 92% but most
of them are in the high 80s to low 90s. Now that might be surprising for some of
you to hear, because all these pages have a ranking of either 1, 2, or 3 for all the
key search terms, and they're generating a lot of traffic. Similarly, my friend Mario
Peshev reported this with his own website. He said that he has articles on there
that are generating a ton of traffic, they have a high bounce rate, yet
they're ranking really well, and they're drawing traffic. The lesson here is, if
you're satisfying the searcher intent, and you're answering their questions in
every way shape or form, that the bounce rate isn't going to hurt you. I'm going
to throw one more metric out here, and that's called dwell time, which is the
amount of time that people spend on your page. One thing that I've noticed with my
own site and with client sites as well, is that when you have a high-ranking
page and the dwell time is also high, meaning people are spending a lot of
time on that page, and maybe they're scrolling all the way down and they're
reading a good chunk of the page, the bounce rate doesn't have a negative
effect on the page. So those pages that have a high dwell time, [where the page is] satisfying
the searcher intent, a high bounce rate doesn't hurt them. It really
depends on the context of what the search is. I don't think you should take
low bounce rate as a set-in-stone indicator that it's higher quality. I
think you can have a high bounce rate and satisfy people. If [the page] is still driving
traffic, if it's not dropping in rank, if there's a long dwell time, and people are
scrolling down the page, and they're reading it, I think that you're doing
your job correctly. Now there's a lot of things that go into keeping people on
the page [and decreasing bounce rate]. First off, you have to have a satisfying amount of main content, and
you must satisfy searcher intent. So give people whatever they came there for --
whether that's the ability to find information, or complete a purchase, or
have a question answered. Be sure that you have all that information there.
Secondly, you want to make sure that it's presented in a way that's aesthetically
pleasing. For example, is the contrast on your typography is enough for people
to read it? Make sure that people can digest and understand the information
that they're seeing very easily. Make the experience of being on your site
satisfying, in addition to having best-in-class content. The last thing
that I want to bring up: and I don't have the citation for this in front of
me, but Google does have ways of tracking how satisfied people are with the content on
your page. Not every website in the world has Google Analytics. I think
it's only about 52% of sites. I could have this number wrong, but I think it's
like that maybe half of sites have Google Analytics, and the rest of the
sites on the planet don't. But, Google has a way of tracking people all the way
from the search, to them clicking a result, to being on the page. They don't
necessarily have to have Google Analytics installed to have that
information. Google Analytics is more there for you, so that you can track your
progress. I do know this: Google has publicly stated on several occasions
that they do not use Google Analytics data in the ranking algorithm. They
actually have a separate means of tracking what happens on the page.
Google Analytics is there for you. The second thing I want to bring up: Google does
have patents on biometric feedback. One way to look at that would be like
facial recognition. That would be things like, if you're looking at a page, and
you're making a squishy-like, scrunched-up, unhappy face, or you're having a
pleased, kind of relaxed look on your face [depending on the content]. Now not saying that they use that currently,
but they just have patents on it. So they are thinking all the time of ways that
they could implement ways to track if you're happy with the content on the
page. One thing that I have read before, and again I don't have a citation or the
source in front of me, I just know that I've read it before -- Google tracks things like the
mouse movements [on the page]. So apparently there's ways to know if people are happy with
what is on the page, because apparently there's happy mouse movements, and
then unhappy mouse movements. So maybe if they're jamming really fast through the
page, and they're just scrolling through, maybe they're not happy with it. But if
they're lingering, or maybe they make certain mouse movements, maybe it means
they're happy with the page, I don't know. But Google studies things like this. So again,
the focus should be on being the best result, and providing the best answer, and
presenting it in the best way possible. I don't believe that bounce rate is a
major factor. I think it might be a minor factor in certain cases, but in
certain cases, a high bounce rate is not going to hurt you at all.
Specifically, if you have a high dwell time, and you're satisfying searcher
intent, and people aren't going back and looking again for that same search again.
I think that's the big factors: high dwell time, and they don't go back and search
for the same thing, and that's consistent over time and over a large set of
results. If you have a SEO question that you'd like to see us answer, go
ahead and drop it in the comments below, and then we'll answer it out in a future
video. My name is John Locke. My business is Lockedown Design and SEO. We help
manufacturing and industrial firms with SEO, so they get more organic traffic
through Google and Bing, and as a result, they get more Requests For Quotes. If
you're getting value from this channel, one thing that I would ask you to do is
subscribe, because we are publishing videos each and every
week, without fail. We're not taking time off. Each and every week, you're going to
see a new SEO video here. That's it for now. Until next time, peace.
[Outtakes: Bounce.]