When I took over my employer's website and reviewed the Goggle Analytics, I came across an alarming number. The website had a bounce rate of 86%. Simply put, a "bounce rate" is determined by how long someone is on your site and if they click through the pages. If your site has multiple "hits" but people are quickly leaving, search engines will translate this as your site having keywords that don't match your content.
Spam sites are notorious for this and by having an extremely high bounce rate, your website could be considered one in the same. Ranking with spam sites causes your website to loss credibility which pushes it further down in search results.
So what is a good bounce rate? I believe Avinash Kaushik, a Google Analytics specialist answered this question well: "My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying."
Our particular problem started internally, by the employees, unaware of the harm they were causing. Like many employers, our company website was the homepage on every computer. That's not an issue if your employees use the site on a regular basis. However if they automatically re-direct to a new website each time they launch the internet, the bounce rate will continue to increase.
Luckily this was a simple fix. By asking all employees to change their homepage our bounce rate improved to 41% within one month!
With so many things to think about when running a company website, something small that could cause trouble can easily be overlooked. So check your bounce rate today and see if a simple internal change could help improve your SEO.
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