I’m not going to come out and say I predicted it, but I had a hunch the most recent Batman movie (The Dark Knight) was going to be dominant at the box office. And even though there were those that doubted me, it was a pretty safe bet. There were too many cards (good and bad) that were stacked in its favor.
I’d like to say I capitalized on my demi-god like prescience and made out handsomely with some online revenue, but sadly I did not. I have one lone website dedicated to Batman and it doesn’t even have AdSense. What it does have is a dozen posts or so on Batman gadgets and training – and these are enough to usually get me 3 or 4 visitors on a good day!
Of course, with all of the recent interest in all things Batman, my blog is getting more traffic than usual and on July 24th it had a huge hit.
This recent uptick in interest gave me a reason to dig into the analytics for the site to see what is what. And one thing that jumped out at me was the different bounce rates resulting from Google and Yahoo search referrals.
Bounce rate is one of those things that is brought up from time to time here on SEOmoz but is never really given the attention it deserves. SlingshotSEO seems to be the leading YOUmoz evangelist for all things bounce rate. We’re told as webmasters and internet marketers that high bounce rates are bad. It means the visitor didn’t find what they wanted and quickly left the site. It is a one page visit of short duration and we should do everything we can to reduce it. And a lot of SEOs think Google tracks bounce rates for each website in order to better refine their search results. So, if you want to get a high ranking and you want to keep it, you need to get your bounce rate to as close to zero as possible. We’ve even been given a trick or two to help us do that.
But I don’t think bounce rate is my problem. Or rather, it isn’t entirely my problem. Clearly, half the people that came to my website from Yahoo liked what they saw, and looked around for a while. For a little website where most posts are at best the Friday night ramblings of a lonely 40-something, that’s pretty good. Yet only 1 in 6 people from Google liked what they saw. And when I dug into the keywords the visitors used to find my site, I found a huge difference between Google and Yahoo.
Since these are medium-tail search phrases, this chart illustrates something interesting. Clearly I rank differently in each search engine depending on the keyword phrases used, and if you were to compare the search engines’ performance based on bounce rate alone, Yahoo would be the obvious winner. The idea of judging search engines based on their bounce rate was floated at least once before by Rishil in his comments to Rand’s post about how Yahoo is the most fulfilling seach engine. Rand’s post wasn’t conclusive, but like most posts here on SEOmoz the real value was in the comments and should be read for that reason alone.
Conclusion
I’m not saying I shouldn’t worry about bounce rate. If I had a high bounce rate for an exact keyword phrase that I was trying to target and convert on, that would be a problem. And that would be my problem to fix. But a high bounce rate for my entire site, across a lot of long-tail or less targeted keyword phrases – that’s not on me. That’s Google clearly not knowing what they’re supposed to be doing.
I would recommend analyzing your bounce rates not at the aggregate level for the whole site, but individually for each of your targeted keyword phrases. If its higher than you’d like, you probably need to figure out what the people are really looking for and then give it to them.
A Disclaimer or Two
I did drill down to the huge surge on the 24th. Nearly all of the traffic was related to questions about “Where did Bruce Wayne go to College?” I can only imagine that it was a trivia question on some nationally available television or radio show (if you’re Googling the answer then clearly you’re cheating!). In any event, once you take out those searches from the data you still have an average bounce rate of 63% for Google compared to 43% for Yahoo when looking at the top 10 keyword phrases. So the skew remains, though less severe.
Secondly, I know this is not necessarily a good sample size to examine the search engine’s performance based on bounce rate. The truth is, of all the sites I own and/or manage this is one of the few where I feel comfortable sharing this level of information – mostly because it is all non-competitive. I will tell you that for my bigger sites, with more consistent traffic levels, Google almost always has a higher bounce rate than Yahoo. The variance between the two can be anywhere from 4% to 15% on a consistent month-over-month basis, depending on the site. This difference even exists across exact keyword phrases – which kind of supports the claim that Yahoo users are more likely to click on to a website (and stay there) than Google users.
Maybe some other moz members can look at their bounce rates for both search engines and share the percentages in the comments. If the bounce rate for Google is almost always higher than Yahoo’s, then it would be interesting to examine why Google remains the more dominant search engine even when it clearly delivers less relevant search results.
Thank you for your time.
