So, your website has been live for a while now and on the surface all seems well. All the graphics are in place, everything is linked up correctly, but for some reason your bounce rate is through the roof. People seem to be arriving at your website and leaving in droves. What possible reason could there be for this?
There are likely a few factors you’ve missed that are putting people off. Fortunately, most of these are easy to rectify. In this article, we take a look at some of the most common reasons why people might be leaving your website too quickly.
Auto Playing Music
Although this feature does seem to be fading from popularity, it still rears its ugly head on the occasional website. Most home users listen to their own music or watch television while browsing the internet, so your website having its own soundtrack is likely to be a source of irritation rather than joy. Office users will either have their speakers on silent making your automatic music nothing more than an unnecessary addition to page load times, and if they don’t the music will be nothing more than a source of embarrassment when it comes blaring out in front of colleagues.
Scrolling Adverts
Spend any time browsing for content online and you’ll have encountered these nasty little critters. They’re those square or rectangular adverts which pop up in the dead center of your screen when you’ve just loaded up an interesting article, and refuse to go away until you’ve either entered your email address or carefully unearthed the minuscule close button blending seamlessly with the background. Don’t use these.
Overtly Complicated Navigation
All content on a website needs to be as easy to access as possible. People want to be able to click through to their desired content as quickly as possible, so 10-tier menu labyrinths aren’t going to go down very well. When a visitor visits your homepage for the first time, they want to see the link to their area of interest within seconds of arriving. Remember, it is quicker for a visitor to simply bounce off to another, better-designed website than digging through a badly designed one just because they happened to get there first. 90% of users will leave your site if they can’t find what they are looking for within 2-3 clicks.
Your Website is Not Responsive
Simply, if your website isn’t responsive, then everything is going to appear tiny on a mobile phone, and people are going to have to go to the the trouble of resizing the website to make everything readable and be able to click the tiny buttons. Again, it will be much easier for prospective customers to bounce off to a website designed with mobiles in mind.
Outdated content
What kind of first impression does your website give to visitors? If the first sight they are presented with is a news feed with the most recent article dated “10/02/2014”, then they are probably going to assume that your company is no longer active. Ensure any blog, news or social media feeds are regularly updated and watch your bounce rate drop. Additionally, regularly updated content means better SEO rankings, so you’re on to more than one winner.
Slow Loading Pages
Nothing’s going to have people hitting the “Back” button away from your website faster than a home page that takes an eternity to load. You need to ensure that all of your images are suitably compressed to allow for a quick loading time, and that all the website scripts are optimised. As well as encouraging people to stay on your website, quick page loading times bring additional rewards in terms of SEO.
No social meia Links
Social media has emerged as one of the most important marketing platforms in recent years. Unsurprisingly, the lack thereof can be a major dissuasion for prospective customers. Social media links show that you are a progressive company, open to embracing new media platforms.
Ensure you are giving People What they came for
Whilst it is getting harder and harder to use SEO for something you aren’t offering, the same cannot be said about PPC. Therefore, it is important that any adverts you have out are actually relevant to the content on their respective landing pages. Whilst no-one would waste their PPC budget sending people searching for “Cheap Cleaning Supplies” to “Bouncy Castle Hire” landing pages (or anything similarly irrelevant), a trap you could be falling into is creating adverts targeting search phrases that are familiar to your own industry sector, yet in practice the people using them will be looking for something vastly different. A good example would be if your company is selling cleaning supplies on an advert generated by the search term “cleaning suppliers”, whereas 98% of people using this search term are in fact looking for a cleaning service. Keep an eye on your PPC, and ensure that people get what they’re expecting when they land on your website.