Shouldn't Lower Bounce Rate Correlate into Greater Click Thru Rate for a Web Site?
-
Greetings:
I run a real estate web site in New York City with about 650 pages out of which 330 are property listing pages. About 250 of those listing pages contain less than 150 words of content.
In late August I set about 250 of the listing pages that generated the least traffic (generally corresponding to those with the least content) to "no-index, follow". Now Google has removed those pages from their index.
The overall bounce rate for the site has been reduced from about 69% to about 64% since the removal of these low quality listing pages.
However the click thru rate has not improved and is stuck at about 2.2 pages per visitor.
Shouldn't the click thru rate improve if the bounce rate goes own? Am I missing something?
Also, is a lower bounce rate something that Google will take into account when calculating rank?
Thanks, Alan
-
Good idea, however according to Google Webmaster Tools under Google Index>Index Status the number of indexed pages has been dropping. It is down by 120 which is about half the 250 which we have set to "no-index, follow" on August 20th. I suspect it may be down a bit more as the results on Webmaster Tools may lag a bit.
I just can't explain why the pages views per visitor has not increased if the bounce rate is down. If the bounce rate has decreased from about 69% in August to 63% in September which means that 37% of visitors are staying on the site instead of 31% which is significant improvement (about 18%). I would think this would translate into more page views per visitor. But it has not. Pages views per session was 2.38 in August and 2.18 in September. This seems impossible.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hey Alan,
You said that you made these changes in late August. Could it be that Google hasn't updated this number for you in the one week ish amount of time it has been since you made the changes? It seems odd that the number would stay exactly the same.
-
Hi Alan,
I assume you mean pageviews per visit rather than click through rate, since you mentioned 2.2 pages/visit.
Pageviews per visit is the average number of pages viewed per session, while bounce rate is single page visits.
Normally, the answer is yes where lower bounce rates would usually correlate with higher average pageviews per visit, however the correlation is not that high since there are many factors included over here (Sources of traffic, landing pages, search keywords, and the list goes on).
So the assumption here is that you would be getting the same quality of visitors, however with decreasing single page visits which would normally increase the pageviews per visit. However bounce rate moving from 69% to 64% is not that big of a difference, and I am not sure what the sample size is for these visits.
I would recommend that you check landing pages with high pageview per visit and start focusing your marketing efforts there and you should find an increase in average pageviews/visit.
With regards to bounce rate affecting rankings, well this only applies for bounce rate you get from organic traffic, since google can not actually determine your overall website bounce rate (or atleast they claim they don't use analytics data), so make sure that your top organic landing pages are well optimized for their target terms with proper call to actions to avoid bounces over there.
Hope this was helpful.
Have a great day,
Moe
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
-
Competitor sites vs mine - No links, lower DA, and still beating me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my question. I have a website - berneseoftherockies.com - it is a bernese mountain dog website My competitors are Rockymountainpuppies(dot)com and Coloradobernesemountaindog(dot)com When using the Moz tools, I see they have no incoming links, except for one site has 5 links from its own pages. But when I type in Bernese Mountain Dogs Colorado - I am no where to be found, except for a you tube video. So what am I doing so wrong? They are basically doing nothing, and killing me in the serps. I have gotten social media stuff like Google +, facebook, twitter, pinterest, and youtube. They are still behind the times. So any thoughtful advice is appreciated. I mainly cater to the state of Colorado where I live. So just curious if there is something at the top of your head that you may think of that's causing my issues? Like could it be my hosting? Like can you have a black listed host? I am with Hostdime I did have a few, like 10 foreign backlinks, which I did remove or disavow I think its called. I have used the title tag tools here to get proper size title tags, and decent keyword density. I built the site for people first, then Google etc. So not sure if you are allowed to tell me, but maybe you can advise me on a decent seo company, or maybe give me a couple tips that may help me out. Please no - read the moz book, I am reading it and trying to do what I am reading. But maybe something simple is keeping me from showing up, while these other sites are. Thank you so much for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Berner0 -
Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited. The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability. Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Why won't my sub-domain blog rank for my brand name in Google?
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+. For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx. We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work. We appreciate any advice you can provide to us. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instabill
Meghan0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Refocusing a site's conent
Here's a question I was asked recently, and I can really see going either way, but want to double check my preference. The site has been around for years and over that time expanded it's content to a variety of areas that are not really core to it's mission, income or themed content. These jettisonable other areas have a fair amount of built up authority but don't really contribute anything to the site's bottom line. The site is considering what to do with these off-theme pages and the two options seem to be: Leave them in place, but make them hard to find for users, thus preserving their authority as an inlink to other core pages. or... Just move on and 301 the pages to whatever is half-way relevant. The 301 the pages camp seems to believe that making the site's existing/remaining content focused on three or four narrower areas will have benefits for what Google sees the site as being about. So, instead of being about 12 different things that aren't too related to each other, the site will be about 3 or 4 things that are kinda related to eachother. Personally, I'm not eager to let go of old pages because they do produce some traffic and have some authority value to help the core pages via in-context and navigation links. On the other hand, maybe focusing more would have benefits search benefits. What do think? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0