Transcript

I want to talk about a really strange human behavior that I absolutely do not understand.

It’s really weird, but there are people out there. Maybe you’re one of them. I don’t know. I don’t get it. That walk out on movies. You know, you go to the movie theater, you pay your, your money. And at some point you get up and you walk out.

It makes no sense to me, but want to talk about this today and use it as a way to illustrate bounce rate.

So again, because someone say just, they pay their money for their movie theater, they are for the movie, they walk into the theater, they watch the movie for a bit, and then they leave.

What motivates someone to do that?

I mean, for me, like, I always say, like, I paid my money and I’m going to see the whole movie and it’s going to be good. I’m going to make sure that I enjoy it. But there are people for whatever reason, leave, they walk out of that movie theater.

That is the same thing as a bounce.

So if you, for those of you that don’t know what bounce rate is, it is in Google analytics.

When it shows up when someone comes to your, your website and they eventually, or they see the content, they click the back button and they go back to the search results.

That is a bounce.

And there are a number of reasons why someone might click that button back button and a bounce.

Typically isn’t really a good thing.

So let’s look at it from a movie theater standpoint. Why would someone walk out of a movie after they’ve paid for it? And they started watching it?

Well, maybe they don’t like the movie. Maybe they’re watching it, they’re getting into it. And they’re like, you know, this is just, this is a terrible movie and I don’t have the time for it.

It could be doing something else.

Maybe they went into the movie thinking that it was something different. Maybe the trailer made the movie seem like it was something much, much, much different.

That is the same thing with the bounce rate.

If you have a piece of content on your website and it is, or it has a high bounce rate say it’s got like 80 to 90% bounce rate. So 90% of the people that come to that piece of content leave, there’s a disconnect there. Right? And typically it has to do with what keywords they searched in Google and how they found your site.

So oftentimes this is where we talk about search intent.

Why search intent is super important?

Is it the, the keywords people are searching might, not quite line up with what you’re actually presenting on the, on the page.

Keywords, that is a, that is a big one. If you go into Google search console, you can actually see what keywords that page ranks for. And oftentimes what you can do is you look at what you’re ranking for in terms of keywords, do a, do a search, see what the top three results are, see what content they’re writing about, and if it’s different from what you’re writing about, that’s why the the bounce rate is so high.

Is it because people are not resonating with your content?

And that kind of is it’s, it’s the big one, right?

The other one is maybe aesthetics.

Maybe your, your page is maybe it’s terrible. Maybe you have an ugly website. If you do talk to someone about it, not a friend, not a family member, cause we’ve talked in the past of the videos.

I’ve talked about the ugly baby theory, where if you have an ugly baby, your friends and your family, you’re not going to tell you, you have an ugly baby, same thing as the website, your friends and family are not going to tell you, if you have an ugly website, you need to talk to strangers.

So go to a Facebook group and drop your URL and say, I need to know, do I have an ugly baby website? That is what you need to do.

The other issue could be, let’s just think, what did the other reasons we got you know, bad, bad design the content doesn’t quite line up, maybe the site loads really slowly.

You might want to check the speed on the site as well. That could be why people that are bouncing as well.

The content could be hard to read. That could be a big thing as well, or maybe you ramble for a really long time before getting to the point and people just don’t have the time to go through it.

I know, oftentimes whenever I’m looking for a solution for something I’ll, I’ll type in my, you know, my question and the page that I go to the first like four paragraphs are talking about, you know, kind of explaining the, the, the topic like, so for example, we’ll, we’ll go with my tennis racket example, say I’m looking to improve my tennis racket swing technique. And I type in, how do I improve my, my tennis swing?

And you go to the article and it says, tennis has lovely sport. It’s enjoyed by thousands of people across the world, blah, blah, tennis got its roots. And so I’m like, I don’t care about the roots of tennis.

All I want to do is get to that point where I’m getting my, my query answered.

And that could be also why your bounce rate is very high.

So it’s really important to monitor your bounce rate on for basically all of your content, because the fact is that is telling Google that the content that you’re creating, isn’t resonating with the people who are searching.

And if we go back to my analogy that when someone uses the search box in Google, they become Google’s customer it’s Google’s responsibility to find the best content for their customer.

If your site has a high bounce rate for the vast majority of your content, Google is going to say, well, almost all the content on that site is, is not helping people. I’m not going to rank that site at all.

So that’s why you need to really think about how often you publish as well. Because if you’re just putting out something super, super fast every single day. So if you’re publishing a post to your blog every single day, and it’s getting a 90% bounce rate, Google’s going to say this person is just putting out garbage over and over and over again. I’m not going to rank them. I don’t care.

But if you really craft a piece of content and put it out like once a month, and it’s something that goes really in depth, really helps people. And over time you monitor it to ensure that it actually does help people. Google is going to rank you so much better, and it’s going to rank your other content because you’re actually providing a service you’re providing value. You’re helping Google’s customer instead of just filling up the internet with garbage.

That is one of the things that really bugs me about the SEO world is that oftentimes we’ve got some, a little battery going on here, get connected in.

Oftentimes people will have read somewhere, and this was true ages ago where you need to publish new content everyday and you have fresh content. That’s not true anymore. You need to have relevant content. You need to have content that people resonate with that solve problems.

So the, the important part to really think about is bounce rate. You really need to ensure that you have a low bounce rate across your entire site.

If you have a high bounce rate across your site and all of your pages have that 80 to 90% bounce rate, my friends, you were putting out crappy content.

And I’m sorry to say that, but that’s just the way it is. So you really need to ensure that you keep that bounce rate low as it’s an indicator that you are serving Google’s customer.

And if you are serving Google Google’s customer, Google will say, send you more customers over and over again.

That’s how it works.

That’s the simplest way I can put it.