Managing a website and all of the side-tasks that come with it can be excruciating. Learning how to manage consistent content publishing schedules, social media maintenance, digital marketing and SEO all present unique challenges – and not everybody is up to the task.

However, understanding core components and metrics of online brand management is critical if you want to be successful in organic forms of marketing. Metrics and stats can highlight how well (or poorly) your brand is doing in search results, social media and beyond. With search results in particular, there are numerous metrics to consider. Bounce rates are among the most important.

Today, let’s examine what you need to know about bounce rates so the dynamic is no longer a confusing concept.

What Is Bounce Rate?

The term bounce rate isn’t necessarily informative or intuitive on its own, but the concept is very simple. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular page who leave after landing: those who don’t click on other links or pages, or interact with the page in any meaningful way. In short, bounce rates measure the number of people who are pinging your website but not engaging with it in a meaningful way.

What Can Affect Bounce Rates?

There are actually numerous variables that can impact how high or low bounce rates are on a particular page or website at-large.

First and foremost, page speed can be a variable. If people are being forced to wait too long for your pages to load, they may decide to go elsewhere. Depending on the exact mechanics of when your analytics (or that of search engines) detect a user’s presence on your website, this could minimize the number of people who bail from actually being detected.

Other variables – such as ad blockers – can also reduce the percentage of people you are able to detect as leaving your page without further interaction. However, search engines are able to detect this, so it may lead to a divergence between the bounce rates you see and those that search engines see.

Do Bounce Rates Matter?

In short: yes! Bounce rates are a critical ranking factor in SEO for search engines like Google. When search engines want to optimize their results, they look at how users interact with pages that are prominently featured. If search engines detect high bounce rates from a particular page, that can be viewed as a page that is irrelevant to the user’s needs or interests. As such, rankings for that page in search results can decline.

What to Expect

While there is no magic formula for an ideal bounce rate (as different sites, industries and niches can naturally have varying rates in general), remember that a high bounce rate as a percentage isn’t necessarily a bad number overall. Some top-ranking pages have bounce rates in excess of 70%, while others have much lower rates. Ultimately, pages should be optimized to encourage engagement, clicks, comments and any other actions that result in more users pinging your website and its additional pages.

Bounce rates can be variable, confusing and frustrating – but the basics are relatively easy to understand. With this info, you’ll now be able to optimize any SEO strategies to better accommodate for this important metric.