Are Visitors Bouncing Off Your Website?

Bounce Rate: The percentage of website visitors who arrive at a website entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site.

You’ve probably heard that the old saying, “If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t apply to a website, and that you need internet marketing strategies to get traffic to your website once it’s built. However, have you ever thought about what happens after a savvy internet marketer gets those visitors to your website?

By simply logging into your website analytics, you can see how many visitors are coming to the site, how many pages they looked at, and if they left your site shortly after arriving to it.

If your website has a high bounce rate you should probably be asking yourself:

• Is there anything broken on the landing page? – Sometimes a high bounce rate can be related to a website issue. Maybe your form is broken, images are missing on the page, or the server is overwhelmed by visitors and the pages are taking too long to load. Any of these factors can chase your visitors away before they even have a chance to look deeper into your site. If you suspect there’s a problem with the page, test, test and test again to make sure everything is working as it should.
• Are my internet marketing campaigns targeting the right keywords? – It’s great to rank well in the search engines; however, if your web traffic is bringing in the wrong type of visitor, they’ll waste your bandwidth and take off as soon as they see that you’re not what they’re looking for. Local businesses need to pay special attention to this factor. For example, a Miami caterer is ranking well for “special event catering”. However, if the visitor that arrives is throwing a party in San Diego, they’re not going to hire a Miami caterer.
• Are my landing pages designed to draw visitors deeper into the site? – Search engine friendly landing page doesn’t have to be a block of solid text that is unattractive to the user. Graphics with call to actions, attractive offers, fun widgets can be value add-ons to get the visitor to stick around and explore the contents of your site.

If you’ve asked yourself these three simple questions and still can’t figure out the answer, then you might want to consider getting some outside help. A strategic internet marketing consultant can offer an outsider’s viewpoint, helping you improve your web pages and get visitors to stick around!