We don't really know if Google’s algorithm takes time on site and bounce rate into consideration when ranking pages, but there’s a strong reason to believe that a low on-site time and a high average bounce rate can hurt your ranking. Especially if you've heard of RankBrain...
Long story short, RankBrain is likely one of the most important ranking factors of the algorithm Google is using to understand the search intent of users. This helps Google to organize the search results better.
If your visitors are leaving the site without opening more than one page, one could assume that RankBrain would say: "This might not be what you are looking for".
What happens next, if what we assume is correct, RankBrain is likely to rank something else instead of your website for that specific search query. Which basically means that you derank. (You end up having worse ranking).
That being said, even without being ranking factors in their own right, on-page time and website bounce rate can influence your ranking by telling Google how satisfied the users are with the content on the website.. So, bounce rate is basically just the percentage of total visitors who abandon your site after visiting just one page. If someone spends one hour or a few seconds on a specific page on your site doesn't matter. Google will mark it as a bounce if people leave your site without opening another site page.
Before we go into more details about bounce rate and time spent, we will take a look at the different frontends we have on Hive and how well they are doing..
As you can see, LeoFinance sits at less than 5000 posts in a month. Hiveblog sits at 23K posts and peakd at 30K posts, which is up to 500% more posts in the same time frame..
So it's safe to say that both Hiveblog and peakd are the most used frontends..
- LeoFinance still DOMINATES both Time Spent and Bounce Rate:
Hive.blog
Peakd
LeoFinance
Hiveblog has a bounce rate of 35.1%. Peakd has 33.9% and LeoFinance sits at 26.2% bounce rate. We all know that statistics don't lie and we can clearly see that LeoFinance has about 7-9% less bounce rate in total. That is obviously a good thing, as it directly tells us that users or visitors are not leaving the site after reading a post. They move to another page on the site, which is likely to be another article.
This takes us to time spent. While hiveblog and peakd sits at 5:45 and 7:10 respectively, LeoFinance has a wooping 12:48. This is the average time in minutes and seconds a visitor spends on the site each day.
While it is basically impossible to give a 100% accurate answer for this, I definitely have a guess. Honestly, it is probably a very good guess as well, as I am sure it is as accurate as we can get..
So, why are people spending more time on LeoFinance compared to these other frontends?
I would say that it's based upon the overall hype, but more specifically, I think this is due to the increasing engagement we have across the platform. Ever since Initiative 10 came to life, we have seen comments, comments and more comments literally all over the place.
As several Lions are also actively rewarding comments (voting on comments), it is a superb way to distribute tokens and for users to earn some extra LEO tokens for their efforts. We have seen the power of engagement on LeoFinance. We have seen the weekly stats and we know how encouraging, inspiring and motivating it is to discuss, ventilate and share our opinions, ideas and thoughts.
With all these comments being made, with all the engagement on LeoFinance, we automatically increase the time we spend on the site as well. It takes time to contribute, and even though comments might be easier than articles to write, it still takes time..
So, 5 minutes and 45 seconds and 7 minutes and 10 seconds.. That gives us the average time spent on Hiveblog and Peakd. With 23000 and 30000 posts in a month. LeoFinance has less than 5000 posts made in a month, but we spend an average of ~7 minutes more on the site..