Why Bloggers Should Watch Their Bounce Rate

Throw a ball against a wall and it will come back to you. How quickly it does that is called its bounce rate. At least it is when the ball is a query and the person doing the throwing is a search engine.

Imagine a game, where one person stands with a ball in their hand. All around them is a circle of people - friends and professionals - all poised to catch should the throw be made in their direction. The person throwing asks a question and casts the ball towards an individual.

They are only allowed to hold it for as long as they keep talking. If there is nothing to say, then the ball has to be returned. Their answer has to be relevant to what has been asked. The thrower can demand the ball back at any time, if it is considered that the receiver is just waffling.

Then comes the tricky bit. They have to also introduce a related topic, which keeps the attention of the thrower. If it passes muster, they get to keep the ball and carry on talking. Extra points for each new subject.

The winner is the person in the circle who can keep hold of that ball for the longest amount of time. The losers are those who consistently have to return it to the thrower or fail to successfully move past the initial question and answer.

How would you play this game? How would you plan your strategy, so that you retained the ball against all comers? Would your answers be relevant and would you have enough to say? Could you impress the thrower with new topics long enough to emerge victorious?

If you are a blogger or any other type of website content writer, then these questions are not child's play. This is precisely how search engines work. The thrower is a potential reader typing their query into their browser.  The circle around them are the links provided as search engine result pages (SERPs). Anyone clicking onto your blog has just metaphorically cast the ball into your hands. How long will you be able to hold it?

Developers of search engines are not stupid enough to tell the internet precisely how they determine high ranking SERPs. If they did that, then unscrupulous programmers would simply design some kind of bot to hook the algorithms. Potential readers would enter their queries and end up on unsuitable pages. Then the world would possibly end.

High ranking links lead to more visitors. They could be potential customers, if a site is monetized. Therefore everyone with a stake in promoting their blog or website is obsessed in trying to determine what pushes certain links to the top of the results pages.

Some experts have noted that sites with a high bounce rate have fared worse than those at the opposite end of the spectrum. This is particularly true of post-Panda Google searches; though previously Matt Cutts had publicly stated that, “To the best of my knowledge, the rankings team does not use bounce rate in any way.”

While noting that any advice on the current situation is pure speculation, bloggers might want to try and lower their percentage in case it does push up their rank.

A more compelling reason to monitor this statistic is that it indicates how well people are being lured into the rest of your site. If your blog is monetized, then that provides extra opportunities for visitors to start perusing your wares.

However, others argue that a high bounce rate could actually be a good thing. It suggests that anyone with a query found their answer on that page. The search result link was perfectly matched to the question. Surely that is a good thing? In truth, no-one has yet come up with a definitive answer.