High bounce rate is not a key factor for defining webpage quality. The website owners often go into a flat spin as they see the bounce rate over 50%. Let’s give the definition of the bounce rate and explain what effect it has upon your website positions on organic search.
According to SEO standards high bounce rate shows that there are some shortcomings on a website: poor-quality content, dead links, low loading speed etc. If you put it in a nutshell, the bounce rate is a percentage of users who visited only one website page. At first glance it may seem that the user opened a page but didn’t find it interesting. So he or she left the page and went to some other resource. According to statistics accounting regulations a time the user spent on a page should be also considered when estimating the bounce rate.
But Google Analytics works in some other way. The trouble is that Google Analytics system does not take into consideration time spent on a webpage during the last session. It happens due to the fact that you cannot know for sure whether the user simply closed the tab, entered other address to the URL bar or finished work with the browser. No matter how much time the user spent on a page, if they didn’t perform any activity there the real time on a website will be “0”. A lot of beginner webmasters fall into this trap.
Google Analytics has a lot of features and you will have to change them depending on a specific website. For example, if there is AJAX form on a page you need to specify this in the statistics monitoring settings. Otherwise, the users who filled in this form will still go to the bounce rate. Now we come to the conclusion that such algorithm is inappropriate for online stores and other e-commerce resources.
