As a small business owner, you have taken great care to market your goods/services and drive traffic to your website. However, all the incoming traffic in the world essentially amounts to nothing if you can’t keep visitors after you attract them!
The Bounce Rate Problem
An industry term that should strike fear in the heart of any good digital marketing professional, “bounce rate” measures the number of visitors to any given website who navigate away from that site after viewing just a single page. Whether your ultimate goal is to make a sale or to impart essential information, a high bounce rate spells failure in the online marketplace.
How to Keep Your Website Visitors Clicking and Reading
So how can you lower your bounce rate or eliminate it completely? The best way is to take a hard look at the website elements and qualities that visitors don’t like. With that in mind, here are the top 5 factors that tend to irritate people within seconds of clicking on a new website. Have any of these irritated you?
- Auto Play Video – Most people want to choose exactly how and when they consume video content. Videos that begin blaring automatically can trigger a “back tab” click faster than anything else!
- Slow Load Time – If your website takes longer than 2 or 3 seconds to load, it is bound to fail in today’s age of high-speed connectivity and super-short attention spans.
- Badly Designed Navigation – It should take no more than a quick glance for a visitor to navigate toward the information that they seek on any page.
- Out of Date Design – Sites that look dated or cluttered will immediately lose out to those that offer messages that are clean, crisp, and clear.
- Lack of Clarity – In their search for relevant content, visitors must be able to immediately determine exactly what each website is selling, promoting, or otherwise communicating.