What is Bounce Rate and Time on Site?

Why is bounce rate important?

Bounce rate is important because you want to keep consumers engaging with your site from landing page to landing page as much as possible. Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who viewed a single page without progressing to additional pages on the site. If you have a high bounce rate, chances are your content isn't appealing or your site isn't responsive and you need to make some changes to your content strategy. Search engine optimization works best when the focus is less about optimizing content exclusively for the benefit of the search engines and more about writing rich, engaging content.

Search engines are learning how to evaluate content and will rank content of the highest quality that matches user search intent first. But even with artificial intelligence, search engines can’t pass qualitative judgments on how well something is written—yet. Instead, they use quantitative surrogates to evaluate content quality. One measure of a page's content quality is bounce rate. 

What is time on site?

Another measure of the quality of a page and the content within is time on site. Time on site is the amount of time between a user clicking on a search result and when they return to the search page.

Longer written materials can keep a person on your site longer. That doesn't mean write irrelevant content to keep someone reading. Create plenty of unique content to keep a reader interested. Informative articles are a great way to increase your time on site. Collect data, important information, and create key points you want your readers to consume. Then, encourage low bounce rate by incorporating a CTA to lead your reader to the next place you want them to go.

Understanding the results with BrightEdge

The BrightEdge platform is designed to identify topics that are popular with searchers. But to improve site engagement, content can’t just be relevant—it must also be interesting, well-written, and guide the reader on a click path into other areas of the site. 

Let’s look at an example of an ecommerce business that sells specialty foods. Within three months of deploying content using the BrightEdge platform, the company saw their bounce rate drop 13%, from 80% to 67%. Since content for this account is intended as a top-of-funnel strategy, the improvement in the bounce rate equaled a full third of organic visitors continuing their journey into the site.

Discover other measures that benefit your SEO efforts with BrighteEdge!