Just read a stat about bounce rate and time on page that blew my mind

I was digging through some SEO studies the other night. Found this one from Backlinko that said bounce rate barely matters for rankings. I always thought it was a huge deal. My own sites have high bounce rates but still rank okay. Turns out Google cares more about time on site. So someone can bounce at 5 seconds from 10 pages and that looks bad. But one person staying 3 minutes on a single page is gold. I must have spent years optimizing for the wrong metric. How do you guys actually use bounce rate in your audits or do you just ignore it now?

3 comments

3 Comments

anna7172d ago

Same thing happened to me with a how-to guide I wrote. It had a crazy bounce rate but people kept coming back to it for months. Eventually I stopped worrying about it and focused on whether people were actually reading the page based on scroll depth. Just started using heatmaps instead and that told me way more than bounce rate ever did.

the_john4d ago

Nah disagree completely. Bounce rate still tells you if your content actually sucks or not.

jana5093d ago

Yeah so in my experience bounce rate is way more nuanced than that. I had a blog post once that had an 80% bounce rate but tons of people shared it on Twitter and I got like 50 emails about it. Turns out people were reading the whole thing, just not clicking anything else because they found exactly what they needed. Your mileage may vary obviously but I stopped treating bounce rate as a straight up quality score once I saw that. Some of my best performing content has high bounce rates because its very specific and people leave satisfied.