Bounce rate is one of the more important things that you will need to focus on in terms of SEO. Many things can affect the bounce rate in positive or negative ways. This can include the site speed, the site content and the internal linking on the pages. The bounce rate can be a great metric to utilize to determine where you can improve your site. Let’s take a look at these items.
Content
Your content is a crucial element of your site, and having it above the fold (the place on the page, where “the screen ends” before you start scrolling down) is important as well. One thing that can entice a user to stay on the website page is by having enticing headlines, or H tags. This can help to draw the eye. Similarly, having a contact form above the fold is a great way to boost conversions, which is tied in with pages/session, bounce rate & more.
Needless to mention, your content needs to be super relevant to what you add in the page’s metadata. Imagine you as a user landing on a page that has nothing to do with what you clicked on in the search results. Evidently, you’ll be bouncing off to the next result.
Internal Linking
While linking is extremely important as a whole, internal linking can do quite a bit in terms of site metrics. They can help to also lead users into a new page, hence ensuring that the pages per session are increased. This is one of the more important items that you should have, but many sites do not focus on it as heavily as they should. Next time, take a moment and really think where the most appropriate place for a link is. Allowing your visitors to hop from page to page will also result in improving another engagement metric – pages per session.
Site Speed
Bounce rate can be largely affected by site speed. In terms of site speed, there are quite a few things that you can do. For example, to increase the speed of loading scripts and images, look into relevant plugins that perform automatic caching, CSS/JS minification, and image compression. If this is not helping, your hosting provider might be to blame. Remember, most mobile visitors will not be staying on the website that takes over 3 seconds to load. Site speed also affects your SEO in general.