SEO: What is the Bounce Rate?

Conversing with @chicaseo On Twitter I came up with the idea for this article, I am simply going to explain what the bounce rate that we see in Google Analytics is about and demystify a couple of myths around it.

What is the bounce rate or bounce rate?

It is nothing more than the percentage of people who enter our site and leave without seeing another page of it.

Myth: The lower the bounce rate, the better our site is optimized.

This can be true for most sites but since all data is neither good nor bad per se, it depends on the context that is given to determine whether or not it is helping to meet our objectives.

For example, Wikipedia should have a very high bounce rate since when one looks for a specific piece of information about a historical person or something like that, it tends to enter to look for only that piece of information and then exit.

The site met its objective (to serve as a universal reference encyclopedia) so a high bounce rate does not prove otherwise.

The same thing happens to me for example in sites or articles where I speak about a very specific topic already that most likely the navigator has only been looking for specific information on a topic for something you need to do soon and have no interest or time right now to read other articles.

Maybe if our site sells something and a product page has a high bounce rate (users don't go to the purchase form for example) there if a high rebound percentage should alarm us and see if by making design or copywriting changes we can improve that situation.

There are plenty of articles on what the bounce rate is, but the only thing I wanted to highlight is the importance of seeing all the data as a set that determines if we are heading well to our final goal, there is no ideal bounce rate.

This varies in each case and it is part of the job of an SEO to determine if our bounce rate is according to our website or blog and what changes we could make to adapt it to our objectives.