Is a high bounce rate bad? The answer is: it depends, but yes, sometimes it can be. Is a high bounce rate bad for SEO? That’s where it gets a little more complicated. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus gives you seven easy SEO tips to address your bounce rate, and increase engagement and satisfaction to make your users happier.
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Video Transcription
Welcome, Moz fans, to a new edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus Shepard. Today we're talking about bounce rate, specifically seven dead simple tips to reduce your bounce rate.
So most of you already know what bounce rate is. But for those who are uninitiated, bounce rate is an analytics term. It simply means a single page or non-interaction visit. When a visitor comes from Google or another website and they visit one page, they have no interaction, and they leave, that's considered a bounce. That is a high bounce rate.
So is bounce rate bad? That's a common question. The answer is, yeah, it can be bad. For example, if everybody is coming to your homepage and you want to get them to your sales page or your checkout page, you don't want a high bounce rate. In that situation, yes, bounce rate is definitely bad. But is bounce rate bad for SEO? Well, there it gets a little more complicated.
Now, to be clear, Google does not use bounce rate. It is not a ranking signal for Google. That said, we do know that there's a lot of evidence that Google does use some sort of engagement signals for SEO that we don't have access to. So in that way you can think of bounce rate as