It’s Not All About SEO, Check Your Bounce Rate

So, search engine optimisation or SEO is important. You want to get people to your website and you can help that along yourself by sending people there through regular email newsletters directing people to your website, social media posts or networking. But it’s not just about sending traffic to your website and it’s certainly not all about SEO you also need to check your bounce rate.

Why should I check bounce rate?

Because you can send people to your website all day, every day but that does absolutely nothing for your business if your website isn’t really good enough and people leave it instantly.

Do you look at analytics?

You should be reviewing your website analytics (often they will be Google Analytics) regularly, at least monthly. When you review your analytics you will be able to see how many people visited your website that month. If this is more than last month then fantastic, well done. But you also need to look at how long those people spent on your website and if they then took a look around and clicked to view other pages.

If your analytics are showing you have a high bounce rate – which means they took one look at your website and left almost instantly, then this suggests you need to spend a bit of time giving your website some TLC and stop focusing on sending traffic there for a little while.

What causes high bounce rate?

There are a few things that could be causing a high bounce rate and putting people off your website but here are some of the usual offenders:

Instant pop ups – very annoying, at least let your website visitor see what it is you do before you offer them a discount or suggest they might want to sign up to your newsletter.

It looks awful or doesn’t work on mobile – well over half of web browsing is done on a mobile phone now so if your website is hard to use on a mobile you are going to be saying goodbye to quite a lot of your website visitors.

Your home page is your autobiography – your homepage should show your website visitor what you do and how you can help them. It should be all about them not all about you and the story of your grandfather who said how great you would be at running a business.

Your blog post doesn’t have a call to action – you’ve written an amazingly insightful and useful blog post, everyone thinks it’s great and then they leave because you didn’t suggest another post they could click on or a product or a free resource that would be really useful. Make sure you give them a reason to stay.

Would you like more guidance?

There are probably even more things that you could improve on your website, so if you’d like more support around improving the user experience on your website, come and join us on our next free workshop.

Or if a workshop isn’t your thing take a look at our 11 Point Website Checklist to get you on track.

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash