For those who are not familiar with the term "bounce rate", this refers to the % of visitors that enter your pages and leave your site right away. The bounce rate can be defined for your site and for each individual page of your site. How can you know what's your bounce rate? If you're advertising with Adwords, you will find this data in the Analytics section, providing that you set up tracking. If you don't advertise with any PPC, you can still find that information by setting up a free Analytics account or by checking stats in the admin provided by your hosting company.
Why is the bounce rate so important? For two reasons:
- if you're advertising with Adwords, your bounce rate is taken into consideration to calculate your keywords' quality score; the lower your bounce rate, the higher your quality score will be.
- in terms of SERPS, a lower bounce rate seems to be determinant as to get a higher position in Google's rankings.
What does it mean? Well, mostly that Google considers that a site with a high bounce rate is a site that offers a poor experience to its visitors; as a result, Google will give it poor rankings whether it's in its organic search results or in its advertising sidebar.
This particularly affects affiliates, as most affiliate sites are built to redirect traffic to third party sites. How can you get around this? Simply by pre-selling your affiliate offer on a single page of your site and have all your - organic and PPC - entry pages linking to that offer page.