Why Google Measures Bounce Rate By Keyword Phrase
Writing by Nick Stamoulis
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Google has always been interested in bounce rates, primarily to let webmasters know how readers are responding to the content on their pages. But what Google Analytics reports as your bounce rate is not entirely accurate.
Every page on your website is optimized for a number of keywords, not just one. Some of those are intentional and some are not. Just in the last 6 months or so Google has been tinkering with the way that it displays SERP snippets. In some cases the snippet is taken from your meta description, most often when the search query used matches your primary keyword for the page. But when a search query is for another keyword phrase the snippet is often quite different. Google will then use a snippet of page content where that search query phrase is used. This supposedly has resulted in increased click throughs.
If Google can measure your traffic for each keyword, which it does, and it can measure your traffic for each keyword per page, then it can measure your bounce rate for each keyword per page. It may not be reporting that to you through Google Analytics, but it’s measuring it. And if Google measures something it’s for a reason.
When a searcher types a search query into Google and finds your website, she immediately determines whether or not that’s what she was looking for. If you have one sentence on your page about the topic she was searching and that’s all she can find then she will likely back out and visit another page on the SERP. If enough users do that then you’ll eventually fall in the search engine rankings for that keyword because Google figures that a high bounce rate for that keyword for that page is a bad fit for its search results page. On the other hand, if you get a high number of searchers who visit your page after a particular search query and they stay on your site longer then that’s a good sign that your web page is a good fit for the search query. You’ll have a lower bounce rate for that key phrase for that page and you’ll rise in comparison to other pages based on their bounce rates for that key phrase.
I haven’t read anywhere that this is the case, but it does make sense and I’m pretty sure that if Google isn’t doing this already then it soon will be.
7 Responses to “Why Google Measures Bounce Rate By Keyword Phrase”
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I think Google has been including bounce rate in its search results criteria for years. I worked on a website case a few years ago in which bounce rate was likely a factor in a sudden drop in ranks and then again a factor when it returned to higher ranks. It wasn’t a 1-to-1 connection but it was suspicious enough to convince me it was a big factor.
And why wouldn’t it be a factor? Google is all about going by what users do, so why not consider bounce rate? People don’t seem to realize that Google is a type of social media. User feedback is a major factor.
This bounce rate idea has major ramifications. For instance, I hear people say that ads on a website don’t effect search results, BUT if people leave your site too quickly because all they see are annoying ads, it’s going to effect your rank.
Thank you.
@Val Nelson – Thanks for reading and your comment!
You are right it makes perfect sense for Google to measure bounce rate since at the end of the day it is about user/visitor experience…
[...] coupled with a lower bounce rate can affect your SEO rankings. We’ve discussed that before here and [...]
This is an interesting theory. Google, in their Analytics FAQ, insists that “Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement. Aggregate data across many customers will be used to improve our products and services.”
Yet I see anecdotal reports from people who claim that implementing Google Analytics has harmed their rankings, and even that cancelling their GA account increased their rankings.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Why would Google penalize sites based on GA data, which would favor sites that don’t use GA at all? Does the decision to measure your site’s performance put you at risk of lowering your rankings because your site doesn’t already perform well (based on bounce data)? Could it simply be that the poor user experience reflected in bounce rates is already detected and factored in by the Google algorithm, irrespective of any Analytics data?
I don’t know the answers, but would certainly like to hear others’ opinions and experiences, as this is certainly an important issue, if true.
@Cary Bradley – Thanks for providing the link to the Google Analytics FAQ…I agree with you I have seen and heard many cases of this but have actually not experienced this myself at all (not using GA increases positioning…)
It would be great if other people could comment on any type of situations they have experienced. Thanks!
I run over 100 Google campaigns a year, and the bounce rates are pretty much consistent, the one thing I did notice is that leads from FACEBOOK bounce rates seem to be double every other website.
Has anyone else noticed this?
@Raymond Galis – Thanks for the comment. Great observation, yeah I have always seen very high bounce rates from Facebook and Twitter visitors for our site and client sites as well…