As a business owner, your top priority is to convert website visitors into customers. Achieving this goal becomes difficult if those visitors don’t hang around long enough to read your content.
More than two-thirds of people who visit websites exit and never return. This is true for even the most user-friendly, optimized websites. Now imagine if you’re getting in your own way, your bounce rate may be even higher.
Your bounce rate is determined by the number of visitors who enter and leave the same page without engaging with other pages on your website. A high bounce rate is an indicator that your landing page and SEO need to be improved. An abandon rate is when a customer leaves midway through the conversion process (i.e. incomplete purchase or form).
The longer you can keep your visitors engaged with interesting, relevant content, the greater the chances that they convert. Below we’ll discuss some of the most common missteps that may be increasing your bounce rate, and suggestions on how to fix them.
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Reason #1: They Don’t Get What They Expect
Choose your website domain name wisely. There’s more than one story out there about a business whose domain address generated confusion by not providing the products or content their name suggested. You’ll experience a high bounce rate if consumers come to your site looking for one thing based on your domain name, but don’t immediately find what’s relevant to them.
To take it one step further, click-worthy headlines are great, but not if they mislead your target audience. If the content doesn’t live up to what your visitors expect based on the title, or worse your content doesn’t match the title at all, people won’t stay on your website.
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What You Can Do About It: Fulfill Your Headline’s Promise
Avoid low conversion rates by not pulling a bait-and-switch from the homepage or landing page to your subpages. Ensure you are providing a great user experience by giving your visitors what they expect based on what your landing page promises.
Reason #2: Slow Load Time
If your website takes too long to load, it won’t matter how great your content is or how useful it may be to your visitors. Page load time can directly affect your bottom line. Even delays of a few seconds can result in a loss of conversions. According to load time stats, nearly half of all consumers expect page times to load in two seconds or less and will abandon a website that takes longer than that.
What You Can Do About It: Take Page Speed Seriously
Poor page loading time can result from a variety of issues. The most common culprit is image size. Unnecessarily large images can have a huge impact on your page’s load time. Compressing images is the simplest way to address this problem.
Other ways to improve page load time include:
- Check speed and performance of specific browsers and in certain countries
- Use browser caching
- Compact your javascript code
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare
The first step to reducing page load time is to review your website’s performance using Google Analytics tools like the Google Page Speed Testing tool. This free tool can help you identify what issues need immediate attention.
Reason #3: Bad Navigation
Unclear navigation is the fastest way to turn a visitor away. If the goal is to convert visitors into customers, why on Earth would it be difficult for them to find what they’re looking for?
You may want to offer a unique customer experience by designing a one-of-a-kind website, but if your navigation options feel like a maze visitors will jump ship. Users expect easy-to-use navigation during their shopping experience. Poor navigation harms your SEO as well as your user experience.
What You Can Do About It: Invest in User Testing
Making your navigation simple to use and easy to figure out is the best place to start improving your website’s user experience. Unfortunately, since you know how to use your own website you may not be able to see the glaring obstacles for new visitors.
Luckily, there are online services that provide user testing if you aren’t confident in your ability to rearrange your navigation and content to meet visitor expectations. UserTesting is one of the many services available.
Reason #4: Cluttered, Disorganized Pages
As much as you’d like every person that visits your website to spend time reading each page or blog post word for word, it’s highly unlikely. So while it’s important to publish quality content, it’s more important to organize that content to ensure readability.
What You Can Do About It: Make Your Content More Scannable
Here are a few simple ways to make your content more scannable:
- Break up long sentences and paragraphs
- Use bulleted lists
- Increase font size and line spacing (when necessary)
- Create engaging subheadings
Visual breaks, well-crafted subheadings, and short sentences will help keep your reader engaged while allowing them to scan your content for what’s important to them.
Reason #5: You Have No Call-To-Actions
If your post is informative, it will keep your readers engaged. The problem is once they’ve found what they came for they tend to exit your website. Including an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) gives users a reason to stay.
What You Can Do About It: Add a CTA on Every Post
The best time to ask your visitors to take further action is after reading your blog post. A call-to-action is important and can be used to increase conversion and engagement. Your CTA should keep your audience in mind and be relevant to the post in some way.
An effective CTA will:
- Direct visitors to other posts they may find interesting
- Invite visitors to browse your e-commerce shop
- Encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter for exclusive deals
If you find that a static call-to-action at the end of your post is going unnoticed, you may want to try an exit intent builder like OptinMonster. Fullscreen overlays, lightbox popups, scroll boxes, and more are available with OptinMonster to customize your dynamic CTA.
If you’re looking for someone that creates website content for you that actually converts, we’re here to help. Contact us about our content writing and SEO services today. A customer relations specialist will get back to you within 24 hours to answer any questions you may have.
