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High Bounce Rate? Here Are 4 Ways You’re Putting People Off Your Website

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If your bounce rate is high, you’re not alone. It’s something that affects millions of businesses every day. 

Customers arrive at their site, experience something that they don’t like, and then immediately click back to search. 

For firms, this is bad news for two reasons. First, it means that you’re potentially missing out on opportunities to sell to willing customers. 

And, second, it gives Google grounds to punish you in the rankings, negating all of the benefits of all that money you’re spending on SEO.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at why you might have a high bounce rate and what you can do about it. 

You’re Bombarding Visitors With Intrusive Ads

There’s nothing more annoying than finding a page with the information you want, only to have that website immediately mash a pop-up box in your face. You’ve experienced this yourself, and you don’t like it, so why do you include it in your web design? 

We get it: you want to collect addresses for your email marketing list, but there’s a better way to go about the process. 

Don’t spam your website visitors immediately. Treat them to an article or web page “on the house” and then, if they stick around, ask for their address. Whatever you do, though, don’t interrupt the customer experience. It’s annoying, and the number one reason people click back to Google. 

Your Website Loading Speed Is Atrocious

Here are some of the things that web design services say slow down your page loading speeds:

  • Loads of complicated Javascripts running in the background
  • Massive image files that you haven’t compressed to use less data (without losing fidelity)
  • Custom fonts that take up more bandwidth
  • Using the cheapest hosting solution, you can find instead of something fit for purpose

Speeding up your web pages can, however, be a technical challenge. For this reason, you’re best bet is to go to an agency. Let their crack team get on with it.  That way, you can avoid missing out on customers and provide a better online experience that does your business justice. 

Visitors Can’t Skim Your Content

Some people who come to your website will take the time to read all your content in detail, but the vast majority won’t. Instead, they’ll skim for the information that they need and then make their mind up about whether they want to buy from you or not. 

For this reason, firms need to be careful about how they design their website content. It’s not enough to create beautiful prose. You also need things like graphics and bullet points that communicate critical pieces of data instantly. Without that, users will click back and look for another source. 

Diverting The Wrong Traffic To Landing Pages

Your customers aren’t all the same. While some may benefit from a subset of your products, that might not be true for all of them.

For this reason, you need to be careful who you funnel from your marketing channels to your landing pages. Create dozens of different pages if you need to. 

Utilise free landing page builders to help you to design landing pages that appeal to different clients for different reasons to maximise their time on your site. The last thing you want is for them to click off and visit your competitor.

If your landing page isn’t fulfilling their query that is exactly what will happen before you are able to stop this happening.

Make sure your landing page is integrated with Google to allow you a better insight into your analytics so you can continually assess how they are working for you and how you can improve their performance.

PM Today Contributor
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