Using Bounce Rate to Optimize Page Performance

Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visits in which users left your site from the entrance page. For example, if 100 people entered your site and 20 of them left without proceeding to view another page, the bounce rate would be 20%. Keeping users engaged on your site is important for both improving the conversion rate and increasing the likelihood that someone will link to your content, which benefits SEO. There are many ways to perform analysis aimed at improving the bounce rate. One of our favorite methods that we’ll explain this week is analyzing the highest bounce rates for non-branded keyword (non-brand specific) search referrals. To do this, generate a report of your non-branded keyword search referrals and sort them with balancing the highest number of referrals with the highest bounce rates (Google Analytics recently made this very easy to do within the UI with the Weighted Sort feature). Next, you want to know which page of your site is ranking in the engines on each keyword so pull one of your most recent SEO rankings report and perform a VLOOKUP in Excel to bring in the ranking page URL next to each keyword (if you don’t have rankings reports, conduct a manual search query on the keyword to find which page URL is ranking). You now have a list of your top non-branded search queries and the pages that rank on them with the highest bounce rates. This will allow you to conduct some competitive benchmarking and usability testing (among other techniques) to understand how to increase the performance of these lowest performing pages. Work with your SEO and UX teams to combat your highest bounced pages.