Rank Bounce?

No, not the coming of age roller-skating drama starring Lil Bow Wow. That, as any true film buff would know, is Roll Bounce. Though I’d love to talk about that, I’m told I have to talk about search engine ranking factors, and one that flew under most of our collective radars - Bounce Rate.

Bounce rate, for the analytics unsavvy, is the ratio of visitors to your site that leave after a single page view. Bounce is a reliable metric for measuring user engagement and overall user experience, but not one that’s received a lot of discussion in terms of organic rankings. Obviously, it would stand to reason that a page with a low bounce rate is more likely to be linked to and more links should equal better rankings, yes? But SEOBlackHat (which we don’t endorse, so we’re not linking to them) noted some striking correlations between bounce rate and Google traffic, which seems to indicate that bounce rates are part of the ultra-mysterious Google algorithm and not simply something for your conversion analysts to watch.

Which means that the answer to “What makes good content good content?” is likely to be bounce rate and/or conversion rate and not simply keywords and links.