Better Search Engine Optimization with Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics metrics to make decision

Bounce Rate

Using bounce rate to find room for improvement

Bounce rate is a useful metric. It’s defined by a visit of five seconds or less, and is usually something you need to address. You may be losing valuable traffic that could have converted into customers.

To see the bounce rate for a specific page, look at your left hand menu in Google Analytics and go to content drilldown. From this page you can sort all your tracked content by bounce rate, and get the scoop on what’s happening on a page by page basis.

A content rich page with a very specific focus shouldn’t have a high bounce rate. If you see this, you may have a problem. There’s an inherent bounce rate with any website. Google Analytics can actually give you a baseline bounce rate to compare to. This data is computed by people using Google Analytics.

You can see what your baseline should be by going to your left hand menu in Google Analytics and navigating to:

Visitors -> Benchmarking

If you have elected to share your data with Google, In the top right hand corner is the bounce rate for your site compared to others in your industry. If not, read on.

You can skip this next part, as it’s for people who don’t have benchmarking enabled.

If you haven’t already elected to share data with Google you can do so by going to your Google Analytics dashboard and looking at the top for

Overview >> yourdomain.com (Edit account settings)

You want to click edit account settings. Click the radio button (circular button) that says

Share my Google Analytics data…

Hit submit, and after that you should be good to go. You can use the benchmarking to your advantage now, and see how metrics of your site rank in comparison to your competitors.

If you have an unusually high bounce rate on an important page, or a sales pitch page, you may need to tweak your content.

Content Adjustment for Better Traffic Conversion

A high bounce rate can be a symptom of a few web visibility maladies. Depending on the issue, there’s many things you can try.

Maximize Above Fold Presence

Above the fold? When a page loads the content that is immediately visible, requiring no scrolling or action from the user, is considered above the fold. This region is important, it’s your first impression, it’s your handshake, it’s your sales pitch. You may not be selling widgets on every page, but if you want to maximize a pages grabbing power you must provide a clear indication of your message and your call to action, if any. You need to let the user know that if they continue reading they could save a fortune on their widgets. To sum it up, make your first impression interesting.

Good Keyword Selection

You can actually rank for the wrong keywords if your page isn’t correctly optimized to emphasize your topic. If you attract a lot of accidental traffic, a high bounce rate can just be the sign of those people leaving. You can improve on this by going back to square one when considering the topic of that page, the url name of the page, and the headers on the page.

SEO Friendly Navigation

This ties in to above-the-fold optimization, but if a user sees your site is confusing and difficult, the user will back out and look for a better site.