After analyzing a couple of my sites over a period of time and looking through the historical stats in Google Analytics, I note that improving Bounce rate improves Google Rank Voting!; No real surprises here I guess, but how many site owners actually take action on existing pages where bounce rate is at say 90% and “average time on site” metrics are 30 seconds or less?

I have a tired old sales page that receives upwards of 200 visitors a day and my bounce rate for the past three months has been averaging out at 92% (embarrassing, but I’ve been busy!). I wasn’t happy with the conversions of this page…period, but never really did anything with it to make a difference.

In a flash of inspiration I was travelling in the car one morning whilst thinking about this site and I thought of how I could improve the user experience so that the bounce rate would improve. When I arrived home I immediately made the following changes to the web page:-

• Completely overhauled the layout so that the copy flowed better
• Added better graphics using photoshop
• Embedded a YouTube video that related to the niche
• Adjusted the Headline of the page
• Changed the Headline font style from Courier to Tahoma

The result of making these changes (which collectively took me around 3 hours) was an immediate increase in bounce rate (when checked over a two week date range), and time spent on site metrics also improved as it would I guess.

The improvement was one thing but I have since noticed that my site has moved up in rankings also (this could also be other sites optimizing and freshening at a much slower pace than me, I know).

In essence I do think that bounce rate figures fairly high up in Googles considerations, after all they are striving for relevant content experiences and what better metric to refer to other than Bounce Rate for this?? If the user feels that they are not seeing what they arrived at the page for, then they are very quickly going to make an exit…