Does bounce rate effect SEO?

A client of ours recently asked the question, does bounce rate effect SEO?

So what is bounce rate?

Google Analytics define bounce rate as – The percenttage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is the measure of visitis quality and a a high bounce rate generally indicates that the websites landing pages are not relevant to your visitors.

How do visitors bounce from your site?

By clicking on a link to a page on a different website
By clicking the “back” button to leave the site
By closing an open window or tab site
By typing a new URL
By Session time out

There is no bullet proof evidence to suggest that search engines do use bounce rate to help rank a website in search results. But having a high bounce rate does imply to the search engines that the website is not relevant to the searched terms and/or the content on that page is not of good quality.

If your website is of a high quality, looks good and relevant to the target market, is easy to navigate and has targeted the right keywords then there should be no need for a person to bounce away from the website. Instead they should be interested by the content and navigate further around the site.

Though not everyone is convinced that bounce rate has a significant impact on your page rank or your search engine ranking poisitons, it’s a good bet that it does has some influence, no matter how small. This means that you should check the quality of all content on your site and ensure that it is relevant to the audience that you are trying to reach.