I mean, Ahrefs is a fairly mature brand in the SEO industry, and most of our channels are measured in millions:

So when we reached that 10k milestone I felt both happy about it, and upset about the number being so low. It was kinda like the “3rd Place Celebration Meme” situation (which I thought would be very fitting to re-create for the occasion):

My main takeaway: getting a podcast off the ground is very, very hard.

It doesn’t compound in the way SEO does and the format of “Zoom interviews” doesn’t perform very well on YouTube.

So if you were thinking of launching a podcast, I can give you 10 compelling reasons why you shouldn’t do it:

• Michelle (our community manager) is doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of researching guests, editing the recording, and managing the whole process end-to-end.
• George and Nikita are the ones producing those cool intros.
• Sergey is designing thumbnails for YouTube.
• Helen is helping with uploads.

Yes, you can cut corners here and there. But you risk compromising the quality. And a low-quality show will make all your promotional efforts a lot less effective.

Before starting Ahrefs Podcast I did probably over a hundred interviews on other people’s podcasts. And I can tell you that being a host is much harder than being a guest. The pressure to make the interview interesting is entirely on you, not the guest.

The guest is mostly in a “reactive” mode—they just need to answer whatever is thrown at you. But the interviewer is the one ultimately responsible for the success of an interview. You have to stay sharp throughout, ask interesting questions, and know where to dig deeper (and when to change subject).

Too many podcast hosts like to cut corners here and just default to asking every guest the same set of generic questions, without trying dig a little deeper into the answers they get.

I love how Ryan Holiday described it:

“They’ll ask you a question, you’ll give an answer and then you can almost hear their eyes scan the paper they have in front of them as they move on the next question on the list.

It’s disrespectful to the guest, but that’s not my real problem with it. My problem is that it makes for really boring audio. Who wants to listen to someone literally phone something in? Why should you listen to a conversation that the host isn’t even listening to?”

Looking at my own habits, 80% of podcast interviews I listen to are by hosts I already know and respect: Nathan Barry, Eric Siu, Dave Gerhardt, Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan, etc. Only 20% are by hosts I haven’t heard of before, but they promoted the episode well enough to get on my radar.

Podcasting is a pretty ineffective way to grow your own audience and popularity. But, on the contrary, it’s a pretty good way to leverage whatever existing audience and popularity you already have.

If you need sales, you’d be better off sponsoring some relevant podcasts in your niche (but even then, we tried it and didn’t see many sales from it). It’s a great way to raise awareness, but not make any immediate sales.

We just crossed a measly 10,000 downloads. It took us 3 months, 10 episodes, and a TON of promotion to get there. And Ahrefs already has a pretty big audience. If I were starting from a blank slate, I would have barely reached 1,000 downloads by now.

Why is it so hard to promote? Well, we basically discussed most of the reasons above:

• SEO doesn’t work for podcasts.
• “Zoom interviews” don’t fly on YouTube.
• Your guests are rarely keen to help you promote it.
• Podcasting platforms don’t have a good “discovery engine”.

In other words, without an existing audience to tap into, it’ll take you a lot longer than three months to reach 10k downloads.

So there’s that.

“But Tim… if podcasting is so troublesome, why are you doing it?”

Well… I didn’t say that podcasting was completely useless and totally not worth it. I merely shared 10 reasons why you should think twice before getting into it.

There’s obviously the other side of the coin. I’ll share my 10 reasons why YOU SHOULD start a podcast once we reach the 50k milestone. Stay tuned! 😉

Many people talk about how important it is to have a “low bounce rate.”

But bounce rate is one of the most misunderstood metrics in SEO and digital marketing.

This article will explore the complexities of bounce rate and why it’s not as straightforward as you might think.

You’ll also learn how to analyze your bounce using Google Analytics 4 exploration reports.

In order to understand what bounce rate is, we need to define what engaged sessions are according to GA4.

What Is An Engaged Session?

An engaged session in GA4 is a session which meets either of the following criteria:

• Lasts at least 10 seconds.
• Has key event (formerly conversions).
• Has at least two screen views (or pageviews).

Simply put, if a user lands on your homepage and leaves without converting (key event), that would produce a 100 percent bounce rate for that session.

If one lands and visits a second page or signs up for your newsletter (as you defined it as a key event), that would mean the bounce rate for that session is 0%.

What Is Bounce Rate In Google Analytics?

Bounce rate is a percentage of unengaged sessions, and it is calculated with the following formula:

(total sessions/unengaged sessions)*100.

So, it’s not only visiting a second page that brings the bounce rate down but also when key events occur.

You can set up any event, either built-in or custom-defined in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), to count as a key event (formerly conversion), and in cases when it occurs during the session, it will be counted as a non-bounce visit.

Here is how to define any event as a key event:

• Navigate to Admin.
• Under Data display, navigate to Events.
• Find the event you are interested in and toggle Mark as key event to turn it blue.

How To Change The Default Engaged Session Timer In GA4

As a marketer, you may want to adjust the default 10-second timer for engaged sessions based on your project needs.

For example, if you have a blog article, you may want to set the timer as high as 20 seconds, but if you have a product page where users typically take more time to explore details, you might increase the timer to 30 seconds to better reflect user engagement.

To change:

• Navigate to Data streams and click on the stream.
• In the slide popup, navigate to Configure tag settings.
• In the second slide popup, click Show more at the bottom.
• Click on the Adjust session timeout setting.
• Change Adjust timer for engaged sessions to the value of your choice.

Here is the detailed video guide on how to adjust the timer for engaged sessions:

What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

So, it’s not as straightforward as saying, “Example.com has a bounce rate of 43 percent, and example2.com has a bounce rate of 20 percent; therefore, example2.com performs better.”

For example, if you search [what’s on at the cinema…], then land on a website and have to dig through five pages of the site to find what’s showing, the website might have a low bounce rate but will have a poor user experience.

In this case, that’s misleading if you consider a low bounce rate good.

On top of that, what use is there in measuring the bounce rate for the whole website when you have lots of different templates that are laid out and designed in different ways, and you track ‘key events,’ aka conversions, differently?

In most cases, this shows that your marketing is effective and well-targeted, and visitors are engaging with your content and wanting to know more.

Remember, bounce rate is not a ranking factor, but when users navigate deeper into your pages, it is an engagement ranking signal that Google may take into account, according to what Google’s Pandu Nayak said during hearings.

That said, it may make sense to track the number of sessions with two or more pageviews in GA4, which you may want to consider as a KPI when reporting.

How To Set Up A Custom Audience With Multiple Pageviews Per Session

If you want to know how many visitors you have who have more than two page views in a session, you can easily set it up in GA4.

To do that:

• Navigate to Admin.
• Under Data display, navigate to Audiences.
• Click the New Audience blue button on the top right corner.
• Click Create custom audience.
• Set up a name for your audience.
• Select scope to “Within the same session.”
• Select session_start.
• Click And and select “page_views” with the parameter with “Event count” greater than one.

You simply tell it to add to my audience all users who viewed more than two pages within the same session. Here is a quick video guide on how to do that.

You can set up audiences with any granularity, like sessions with exactly two or three pageviews and greater than three pageviews.

Later, you can filter your standard reports using your custom audiences.

How To Do Bounce Rate Reporting And Audit

Next time your boss or client asks you, “Why is my bounce rate so high?” – first, send them this article.

Second, conduct an in-depth bounce rate audit to understand what’s going on.

Here’s how I do it.

Bounce Rate by Date Range

Look at bounce rates on your website for a particular period. This is the most simple reporting on bounce rate.

To do that:

• Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
• Click ‘Blank’ report.
• From Metrics choose “Bounce rate.”
• Set Values to a “Bounce rate.”
• Under Settings (2nd column), choose visualization type “Line chart.”
• Select the date period of your choice.

If you see spikes in the chart, it may indicate a change you made to the website that influenced the bounce rate.

How To Analyze Bounce Rate On A Page Level

When running a lead generation campaign on many different landing pages, evaluating which pages convert well or poorly is vital to optimize them for better performance.

Another example use case of page-level bounce reports is A/B testing.

To do that:

• Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
• Click Blank report.
• From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
• From Dimensions, choose Landing page + query string.
• Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type ‘Table.”
• Set Rows to a “Landing page + query string.”
• Set Values  to a “Bounce rate: and “Sessions.”
• Set the filter to include pages with more than 100 sessions ( to ensure the data you’re mining is statistically significant).
• Select the date period of your choice.

Tip: You don’t need to create a new blank exploration report; instead, add another tab to the same report and change only the configuration.

How to set up page level-bounce rate report.

If we don’t filter by sessions number, you’ll be looking at bounce rates on some pages with only one or two sessions, which doesn’t tell you anything.

Once you’ve done the above, repeat the process per channel to gain an even more rounded understanding of what content/source combinations produce the most or least engaged visits.

How To Analyze Your Bounce Rates By Traffic Channel

Bounce rates can be wildly different depending on the source of traffic.

For example, it’s likely that search traffic will produce a low bounce rate while social and display traffic might produce a high bounce rate.

So you also have to consider bounce rate on a channel level as well as on a page level.

The bounce rate from social and display is almost always higher than “inbound” channels for these reasons:

• When a user is on social media looking through their news feed, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.
• When a user sees a banner ad on another website, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.

However, for inbound channels like organic and paid search, it’s logical that the bounce rate is lower as these users are actively searching for what you are promoting.

So, you capture their attention during the “doing” phase of their buyer’s journey (depending on the search term in question).

To dig deeper into each one:

• From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
• From Dimensions, choose Session default channel group.
• Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type Table.
• Set Rows to a Session default channel group.
• Set Values to a Bounce rate and Sessions.
• Select the date period of your choice.

A little homework: Try to plot a line graph based on the bounce rate for your organic traffic.

Now, you can dig deeper into the data and look for patterns or reasons that one page or set of pages/source or set of sources has a higher or lower bounce rate.

Compile the information in an easy-to-read format, ping it to the powers that be, and head for a congratulatory coffee.

Do You Have The Right Intent?

Sometimes, you’ll find pages that rank in search engines for terms that have more than one meaning.

For example, a recent one I discovered was a page on a website I manage that ranks first for the search term ‘Alang Alang’ (the name of a villa), but Alang Alang is also the name of a film.

The villa page had a high bounce rate, and one reason for this is that some of the visitors landing on that page were actually looking for the film, not the villa.

By doing keyword and competition research to see what results your target keywords produce, you can quickly understand if you have any pages that rank well for terms that could be intended for other topics.

When you identify such pages, you have three options:

• Completely change your keyword targeting.
• Remove the page from the SERPs.
• Overhaul your title and meta description, so searchers know explicitly what the page is about before they click.

How To Increase Website Engagement

Now you’ve figured out what’s going wrong, you’re all set to make some changes.

All of this depends on your study’s findings, so not all of these points are relevant to every scenario, but this should be a good starting point.

Most importantly track custom events as “key events” (conversions) so things like newsletter sign-ups result in Google Analytics classifying that as a non-bounce even if the user didn’t visit a second page.

Is High Bounce Rate Bad?

Hopefully, you now understand why bounce rate isn’t simply “high” or “low”. It depends on many factors, and there is no single answer to the question, “Is high bounce rate bad?”

If you defined your ‘key events’ (conversions) and GA4 settings correctly for your goals, a high bounce ( +90% ) rate is definitely concerning because it means your visitors don’t engage enough with your webpages.

But if you have GA4 on default settings, you can never rely on data because of the reasons we discussed above.

Never assume anything. Do your research and make sure you configure your GA4 account properly to track ‘key events.’

Now, go forth and conquer your bounce rate!

More resources:

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Digital is the primary marketing channel for many companies.

Many owners and executives still have difficulty budgeting for online marketing.

Budgeting for SEO can be complex and influenced by factors like project scope, industry competition, and specific services needed. There is no universal calculator for calculating costs.

This article explores key SEO pricing components and how to calculate and plan your budget.

What Businesses Don’t Understand About Investing In SEO

SEO is an area where you truly get what you pay for. Investing adequately in SEO services can significantly impact your online presence and business growth.

According to recent data, over half of all SEO professionals work with monthly budgets ranging from $500 to $5,000, with 28.6% reporting budgets in the $1,001-$5,000 range.

Many business owners are reluctant to invest in SEO, often because they lack understanding of how search marketing works and are too busy running their businesses to learn about SEO.

Most industries follow a standardized, step-by-step process to achieve specific outcomes.

Many business owners mistakenly assume SEO works the same way, treating it as a commodity.

This misconception leads them to fall for low-cost offers like $99/month “guaranteed page one” services from spammers and scammers, which never deliver meaningful results.

The Cost Of Cheap SEO

I belong to several internet marketing groups on Facebook. It’s truly frightening the number of noobs posing as SEO professionals and taking on clients.

It’s common to see a question like: “I just landed a client that wants to rank for [keyword x] – how do I do it?”

A close second is people using link schemes, specifically private blog networks and third-party pages known as parasite SEO, without ever explaining the risk to clients. Many use AI to generate content at a scale without fact-checking.

However, AI can be a powerful tool when used ethically in SEO.

AI helps automate data analysis, identify patterns, and streamline content creation and optimization, which in turn helps to reduce SEO costs.

If business owners were just throwing money away by hiring an incompetent SEO, that would be bad enough. Unfortunately, the collateral damage from “cheap SEO” can go much deeper.

It can draw a Google penalty and virtually wipe out a website’s visibility on the web.

Business owners must remember that they’re ultimately responsible for any SEO work performed on their site. They should discuss the specific tactics service providers use before entering into an agreement.

Managing Your Resources

With Google utilizing 200+ (and likely exponentially more) ranking factors, it’s easy to become intimidated and paralyzed.

The good news is that if you focus on just three factors, you can still crush it, regardless of your niche.

Here’s what you need to pay attention to:

1. Information Architecture

Your site should:

2. Content

Your site’s content should conform to best practices as disclosed in the Search Quality Ratings Guidelines with an emphasis on:

3. Backlinks

• It must be natural. Avoid popular link schemes like private blog networks (PBNs) and paid guest posts. Instead, focus on building real links from topically relevant websites with high-quality content.
• Quality is key: A lower number of high trust/high authority/relevant links can outperform a large quantity of lower quality links.

You Manage What You Measure – Set Goals

Before establishing a budget, one must define specific goals for a campaign.

Your goals should include measurable results, a defined timeframe, and an actual measurement for success.

At one time, success was measured solely by keyword rankings. While SERPs remain an important metric, they are not the most important.

I would argue that the most important metrics are those that directly impact the bottom line. Organic sessions, goal conversions, and revenue fall into that category.

Goal setting could include improving organic sessions by X%, increasing conversions by Y per month, and/or increasing revenues by Z%.

When setting goals, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind.

First, they need to be achievable. Stretch goals are fine, but pie-in-the-sky benchmarks can actually work as a disincentive.

Equally important: you need to give the campaign time to work.

According to Google,

“…in most cases, SEOs need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.”

Developing A Budget

Your goals will determine what tactics are needed for success. This, in turn, sets up a framework for developing an action plan and the budget necessary to support that plan.

This brings us full circle to positioning and paying attention to those factors that move the dial.

The answers to those questions will determine priorities as well as the volume of work needed to reach your goals.

In many cases, the actual work performed will be the same, regardless of budget level. The difference is the volume of work performed.

If you add twice the content and twice the links at budget level “B” compared to budget level “A,” you are more likely to achieve earlier success at the higher budget.

That said, the right budget is one you can afford, without losing sleep, for a minimum of 6 and ideally 12 months.

It takes time to properly plan, implement, and tweak a campaign to evaluate its success.

Also, remember that the lower the budget, the longer the journey.

How Much Can You Expect To Spend On SEO?

To execute a local campaign, you could budget between $1,001 and $5,000 per month, the most common budget range among SEO professionals SEJ surveyed in 2023.

The budget will likely be higher for a national or international campaign, with many SEO pros working with budgets exceeding $10,000 per month for broader campaigns.

Some firms offer a “trial package” at a lower price with no contract. This allows prospective clients to test their services while minimizing risk.

There are some options if you can’t afford to retain a top-level SEO pro. The most common is a one-time website SEO audit with actionable recommendations.

Just fixing your website will often lead to a meaningful boost in organic traffic. Content development and keyword analysis are other areas where you can get help from a pro for a one-time fixed rate.

Another option is to become an expert and do it yourself.

SEO Cost Calculator – Measuring Organic Search (SEO) ROI

The following is a calculator commonly used for (incorrectly) measuring return on investment for SEO.

Organic Search ROI Calculation Assuming “One Shots”

The flaw in the above calculator is that it fails to take into consideration the lifetime value of a new customer.

Online retailers need repeat business to grow. By not calculating the lifetime value of a new customer, the true ROI is grossly understated.

The right way to calculate ROI is to build lifetime value into the calculator.

To calculate the cost of SEO and its true ROI use this formula:

Average lifetime profits from new customers acquired in one month divided by monthly organic marketing spend.

Organic Search SEO ROI Calculation Assuming Lifetime Value

As you can see, that one variable makes a huge difference in how the ROI is stated.

SEO Campaigns Are Long-Term Investments

Unlike PPC, an organic search campaign will not yield immediate results.

A comprehensive SEO campaign will involve a combination of technical SEO, content marketing, and link-building. Even when executed to perfection, it takes time for Google to recognize and reward these efforts.

That said, the traffic earned from these efforts is often the most consistent and highest-converting among all channels.

More resources:

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