Bounce Rate a factor?

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Guys,

I've been SEOing two sites for just over 6 months, making very little headway in the process. All the tactics I have employed work on the many other sites that we do SEO work for.

I have written pages of rich, useful content, metas, built links from various sources, re-built both sites on a better platform, alt tags are optimised etc etc.

This seems to have brought me some success but nothing to write home about.

The only major difference I can see between these two sites and my others is bounce rate. The SEO pages I have produced have a fairly healthy bounce rate (20-30%) which isn't a problem, but, both sites have blogs which draw (a lot of) visitors from various social networks and the bounce rate is through the roof (80-90%) obviously increasing the average for the whole site.

Now, I know there has been various discussions around this with no real outcome but I cannot see what else it can be.

Am I missing something?

I should add that both sites are in competitive sectors but not that competitive to stop me seeing at least top 100 results....

[irvingw]

all good advice given above. Have external links like social media sites and external blog urls open in a new window instead of kicking the user off of your site.

[eyepaq]

Bounce rate is a ranking factor, a major ranking factor - but not the bounce rate you see in Google analytics.

Google only measure and take in consideration the bounce in serps.

The bounce rate that google is taking in consideration is outline bellow:

So if someone is searching for something, clicking on your result but then the user hits the back button and is clicking on a diffrent result in serps without changing the query  then that is a bounce.

Sometimes, also for new sites google is pushing pages up in serps in order to have clicks and calculate the user behavior - this bounce rate.

The Google analytics bounce rate is a good internal indicator but I would't spend time on it or "upgrade" it to a number that you should monitor and track.

Hope it helps.

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your replies.

All re-directs are in place and work as they should and unfortunately the blog does attract more visitors and page views than anything else at the moment - something I'm trying to sort out.

The issue I have with the blog is that I don't run it, and no matter how hard I try the guy will not write posts that are relevant to the business! (Well, they are loosely but not the traffic they are looking for)

Moz Rank is 29 and 25 which isn't to far behind the major competitors and above some. The only  issues I am seeing are 'too many on page links' which I am addressing but the vast majority of pages with errors are all blog pages.

Thanks,

Dan

[ske11]

Hi

If you were able to share the site URL I would be happy to have a closer look at what could be causing you an issue.

The points Nigel raises are good places to begin, have you used the tools on seomoz to run a campaign and see what Roger says the issues are?

Sean

[Richard555]

Hi You mention rebuilding on another platform - I assume you made sure if pages changed URL you put in redirects. A blog will tend to have a higher bounce rate as it is something people read and then go. Try adding in more useful links within the content to get people to click through your site. Have you checked the keywords your blog is attracting? Maybe they are not aligned to the blog content. Unless your blog is accounting for the majority of page views and visits I don't think the bounce rate is likely to be your main issue. A high overall bounce rate tells Google people don't find what they were looking for - thus is a contributing factor to search results. You don't mention your website so can't give specific suggestions but have you checked your moz rank / compared to your competitors - that might indicate what else is wrong. All the best Nigel