Engagement - but high bounce rate?
-
Hey gang.
So I am a writer/amateur SEO/outreach guy for my agency.
We have a client that fixes garage doors only in the the city of Portland Oregon.
I wrote him a blog (this is not the real title) Called 5 ways to fix my garage door fast.
It is doing pretty well and getting over a thousand visitors a month. But we all know that people coming to that blog could be from anywhere in the world, and most likely are not going to purchase garage door repair service from my client.
We all know that. And that's why the page has a 98% bounce rate, but an overall good time on page.
My superior sat me down and told me that I have to stop writing content like this, because all the content we write should be location focused.
He said having a high bounce rate like that is actually bad for the site and is not helping at all.
What do you guys think?
Is he spot on?
Thank you!
-
Thank you for that suggestion.
I believe the more keywords you rank for and the more traffic you get to your site, the higher your authority will be, and the easier it will be to rank for the KW's you want.
-
98% bounce rate is more indicative of ghost spam in your analytics than actual users. Moz writes a great article about what ghost spam is and how to stop it here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
A high bounce rate isn't helping the site, so at best it's a null effect, at worst your superior is correct and it's impacting your rankings. Again, Moz has a great article on the topic: https://moz.com/blog/traffic-engagement-metrics-their-correlation-to-google-rankings
From the article: "**Bounce rate: **At first glance, with a correlation of -0.08, the correlation between bounce rate and rankings may seem out-of-whack, but this is not the case. Keep in mind that lower bounce rate is often a good indication of user engagement. Therefore, we find as bounce rates rise (something we often try to avoid), rankings tend to drop, and vice-versa."Keep in mind that's measuring correlation, not causation. As no one has been able to prove that Google uses engagement metrics as ranking signals we cannot definitely say whether or not bounce rate has a direct impact, but for obvious reasons we want to keep bounce rate low.
I hope this answers your question more fully.
-
I certainly am a team player.
Thank you for the advice, but not what I was looking for.
Anyone else?
-
Your client is a small business owner whose concern is in bringing in quality leads that are going to turn into customers. The strategy your superior wants you to follow is in line with your client's business objectives of bringing in leads with a local SEO strategy. At the end of the day, whether or not you bring in leads from organic sources is what your client is going to judge your performance on.
Whether your superior is technically right or not doesn't truly matter here. What matters is your client, and he's counting on you and your team to grow his business with a competitive local SEO strategy. Be a team player, and focus on the strategies that will bring him quality leads.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are the SEO implications of high quality backlinks from US-based websites to UK-based websites?
Hi everyone, quick question I hope someone could help me with: We're representing a client based in the UK. As part of their overall strategy we've been linkbuilding. At the moment, about 80/90% of the links we've gained come from UK-based sites, with 10/20% coming from US-based websites. The US based websites are very good (think New York Times and genuine, relevant blogs with good readerships). An external search analyst/consultant has contacted the client to say that the US links will be harming the site, because the links are from websites in the US and not the UK. We believe that if 80/90% of the links were from the US this could indeed cause harm as it could indicate to search engines that our client is in the US when it's not (which might compromise their chance of ranking in .co.uk versions of search engines) however because it's only 10/20%, and because the linking sites are very good, we believe that they will getting all of the benefits of the positive metrics without any meaningful negatives. We just wanted to get a few opinions on this to see if people think that we're mistaken, and would be glad to hear any opinions contrary to our own.
Link Building | | GoUp0 -
Sponsored Backlinks on High P.A. and PR sites
Hi, What about creating sponsored backlinks in pages with huge P.A./D.A. and PR, but not related with my site content?
Link Building | | silvioalmeida
Like in review sites, general content sites and newspapers? Will it harm my business?
I see that many of them have a weekly sponsored article...0 -
Backlink count is WAY high vs. competitors
Hi all! My site was managed by a SEO company that is no longer around. I started to look for a new agency and in the process, found Moz and decided to try out the report. While running the report, found out that my I have 3K links vs 173/1600/6344 links that my three other competitors have. Any simple guidance will be appreciated.
Link Building | | fullerton0 -
4 Things to Ask When Looking to Hired Peoples for Guest Blog with High P.A.
I want to hire a contractor on eLance to built back links using guest blogs For the guest blog submits, those are the things a will ask: a post where I can comment with a Page Authority of 20 or more a blog where I can post has guest, where I don't have to create a account - a blog that accept comments and have comments in the post - the post page suggest must be pretty new, not more then 6 months old Do I forget something? Do you have any comments on this or anythings I should know before posting this job? Thank you, BigBlaze
Link Building | | BigBlaze2050 -
Content Strategy - High Value on Lots of Sites vs. High Value on One Site
Good afternoon Mozzers. I have a discussion based question and I'd be interested to know your thoughts. I currently implement a content strategy where we create a series of high value How-to written articles, relevant to our audience and then work at getting them placed on multiple high value websites. I have just been offered an opportunity with a PR6 domain to create a similar series of content but place it all on their site with links back to ours through a dedicated section. So my question is would I gain more value from small amounts of great content in lots of places vs. a lot of great content in on place? Effectively 1 link from 20 sites vs. 20 links from 1 site.
Link Building | | RobertChapman0 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | | JoshED0 -
Rank dropped suddenly. Ways to bounce back?
So, like million threads out there I lost my rank for a particular page and is looking to bounce back. However there might be something different in my case, hence the thread. 1. The rank drop was an after effect of design change, where we merged two pages together. Page A - which was ranking for Keyword A and Page B which was ranking for Keyword B. So we merged it together in the sense that both had similar content and design except the meta tags and page title (I wasn't involved in this project so...) and Page B gets kicked out of Google web index. Page A still remains number 1 for Keyword A. 2. There was some shady link building contract that was implemented some 3 months back (again me not involved, I joined later) and there were an unnatural number of links created with a striking artificial anchor text pattern from low quality "built for link building" blogs. I presume this also affected page B. as this effort was done only for Page B and not A. So now, I managed to clear all the pages for duplicate content, implement a better page structure where I deleted out possible similar pages, redirected them (301) to main pages, and created a new page for Page B, like Page B1 with different content. Implemented a better internal linking profile too where terms related to Page B (Keyword B, Keyword B1, B2 etc) links to Page B. Its been two months now, and Page B ranks for Keyword B1 but not the original Keyword B. I suppose the "penalty" still remains in Google. Any clues how I can get around this? What I want to achieve is to get ranked for Keyword B for Page B, if not the first result, at least start all over from a lower rank but at least break out of the penalty.
Link Building | | Druva0 -
High PR vs Low PR and Relative
My main question is if you had a choice between a PR 7 site and a PR 4-5 site that was relative and related to your website content, which would be a better choice? Does relativeness matter anymore?
Link Building | | blackrino0