Quick Series Recap…Part One was a discussion regarding personalized search and how search engines are factoring in your location and past search habits to return search results that will be more relevant to you personally. If you are keeping tabs on your website’s SERPs, you may be surprised how your positions will vary across multiple searchers.

Part 2: Bounce Rates Will Affect Your Search Engine Rankings

Another new ranking factor that Google is starting to integrate is bounce rates. A “bounce” is determined when a visitor lands on one page of your site and then leaves. Web analytics software programs track these occurrences and tally them up to establish your site’s “bounce rate”. If people are consistently landing on your site and then bailing, but they stick around and peruse your competitor’s site, what would we logically surmise from this situation? Their site must be more engaging. Google is going to give them credit for that and rank them higher. Can you blame them?

Google has done a spectacular job of flooding the web world with their free Google Analytics (GA) platform. On the website owner side of the coin, GA offers a plethora of analysis and reporting tools that provides an enormous amount of insight into how a website is performing. On the other side of the coin, Google is storing and mining all that data. And since GA has been so widely adopted, Google is keeping tabs on hundreds of thousands of sites.

I’m a GA user. They know my site’s bounce rate. I can only hope my bounce rate is helping my rankings.

Might your bounce rate be negatively affecting your rankings? Are you monitoring your bounce rate? Need help?