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
-
How to get High Quality backlinks to a new site
Hey I am new to SEO and I have a completely brand new domain can anyone suggest me a way to get high quality backlinks to improve my site ranking ??
Link Building | | tupwi0 -
Total Exact Match Anchor Text Percentage or a Few High Quality Exact Match Backlinks, which is better?
Hello, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to rank a web page for a competitive regional search term. Upon inspecting all the competitors’ backlinks they appear to using an overly high exact match anchor text to rank on the first page for this keyword. Somewhere in the region of 15 – 55% exact match anchor text. So the question is what does big G provide a heavier weighting for, A.) The total percentage of exact match anchor text for all your backlinks, until it reaches the point of over optimization. A higher percentage up to about 60% will help you rank in the top 3. Meaning I should change a 1,000+ backlinks on multiple domains to the exact match anchor text. B.) Or just a few backlinks with the exact match anchor text but from really high quality domains with a ‘Majestic SEO’ Trust and Citation Flow above 40. Any help would be appreciated, exact match anchor text is meant not to work but it still does.
Link Building | | tomfifteen0 -
How is this site ranked so high on Google?
How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share). So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase? My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.
Link Building | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
High PR Web 2.0 sites
Hello, I was wondering if you could provide some advice on which are the best Top 20 high pr web 2.0 properties for content besides wordpress? Whilst i do intend to use them to further improve my SEO campaign I also intend to use readable content, that is to say, content that i have written and i feel is worthy of being read by interested parties. What are the top 20 to look at that would benefit an SEO campaign if used correctly (without abusing or being spammy). I can see lots of crappy ones out there but they all look spammy to me and im not really liking that.
Link Building | | irdeto0 -
Are reputable local directories effective link building resources for high rankings in local search?
I'm working on a local search campaign. Generally, the first thing I do is add the site to all of the local directories that I know of. I'm curious, with penguin updates, whether or not this is still an effective strategy for local search.
Link Building | | GuyFromHouston0 -
Targeting high Page Authority sites vs high Pagerank sites for backlinks?
For many years I've been working on seo/backlinks for my website. When doing analysis in opensiteexplorer I notice that the highest listed backlinks for my site are sites with high page authority and domain authority, rather than pagerank. For example one of the highest backlinks for my website has page authority/domain authority of 72/96 but the site itself is only a PR2, while my other backlinks have PR4, 5, or 6 with lower page authority. For a while I've been trying to partner with websites for backlinks from high pagerank sites, as I've always believed this is the #1 metric in relaying link juice. But OSE's metrics seem to not follow that train of thought -- it believes page authority/domain authority is a more important measure. Is it? Should I change my strategy to try to partner with websites that have high page authority rather than focusing so much on pagerank?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
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 PRLinks
hello, what would the effect be of acquiring 10- 20 Pr 8 - 10 links to website that is on the first page of goolge. would it make a huge difference? thank you Mozzers 🙂 love and respect V
Link Building | | vijayvasu0