Although there has been much debate over what a ‘bounce’ actually is, I think what pretty much sums it up is that a bounce occurs when a user arrives at your website, only to use their internet browser’s back button to leave, without looking at any other pages on your site.  Therefore bounce rate is essentially the percentage of your visitors who don’t stay long enough to take their coat off.   Search engines want to provide the best possible results for their users, so any websites with very high bounce rates can be looked down on by the major search engines because their users don’t seen to be finding what they are looking for on your site.

Because your ultimate goal is to have visitors to your website to convert into customers, there are a number of Search Engine Optimisation techniques that you can employ in order to minimise the number of users who ‘bounce’ away without finding what they were looking for.

The main aim of good Search Engine Optimisation is to work with search engines to make sure that your website is accurately represented to them, thus enabling them to provide accurate and relevant results to their users.  Using ethical SEO techniques which ensure that your website is easy for search engines to find, understand and index, means that the engines should have a pretty good idea of what your website is all about and will know if it fits a search that a user makes.  Because the user searches for something specific, and finds themselves on your website via the search engine, the likelihood is that you are a good match for their requirements.  This user is searching for products or services specific to your industry, which means that they are interested already, so the conversion from visitor to customer is not a giant leap and as a result of your SEO efforts, your bounce rate is greatly improved.

Of course, websites these days are certainly not all about information.  They also need to look good and implement a user-friendly, effective navigation system so that the people who visit your site like what they see and can easily move around the different parts of your website.  Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t simply deal with text and unseen technical details.  Most good SEO companies can also redesign your website, adding features and functionality which are SEO-ready but also focus on providing an excellent user experience so that the days of many visitors clicking onto your site and bouncing straight off again are a thing of the past.

The textual content of your website is an important consideration when thinking about user experience and Search Engine Optimisation.  A website with clear and well written copy looks more professional and trustworthy than a website stuffed with keywords so much that the content doesn’t make sense, or riddled with spelling or grammatical errors. A good SEO company can provide copywriting advice and professional writing services to help you make the most of your content. Both search engines and internet users want websites that are easy to understand and informative and this can certainly have an effect on your bounce rate and can be an indicator to search engines about the quality of your website.

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