Your Bounce Rate is Out-of Control
I get asked A LOT about bounce rate. I mean a lot. So when you are looking at your analytics and you see your bounce rate and you almost shit your pants because it’s over 50% you may have a few questions. Like what in the holy hell is bounce rate mean. Bounce Rate is when you get a visitor to your site and they land on whatever page they found and they leave your site without looking at a second page. Basically, the page your visitor is not what they want and they left. Simple. Now how do you fix that? Well in analytics you can look at your pages and see which pages have the higher bounce rate and open them up and then you need to go through these steps. But, it’s my home page? So! Any page that has a bounce rate is going to need fixing.
Are you sending them to that page from Facebook? If your post is not matching the page you sent them to. For example, are you promoting a product and sending them to your contact page. So either you need to double check your links or make your site more navigatable. Easy sites to navigate keep people happy.
Another point on this is, your content needs to answer the visitor’s questions. Give them what they want. Send them to pages that will help them or get them what they want.
Constant Content helps your Bounce Rate
I know, I don’t have time for content blah, blah, blah. It takes 15 min for someone to type 300 words. And new blog posts give more opportunities to link to. Instead of Facebooking on your phone while your hiding from people maybe record a 1 min video that you can put up on YouTube and Facebook and create a blog post. Give them content to keep them there and wanting to go through your site.
IF YOU ARE PAYING SOMEONE ELSE TO WRITE CONTENT FOR YOUR SITE THAT HAS NEVER SET FOOT IN YOUR BUSINESS OR MET FACE TO FACE YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!!! Nobody knows your business better than you. Take the time and write a post or record a video.
Video and Images
Make your homepage pop. Put some images relevant to your content may be a video. Link them to other pages on your site. But you have to make sure your images are optimized correctly. You don’t need a bunch of images, just a couple will do you just fine.
If you are doing a video, embedding it from YouTube or Vimeo are the best option. Make it short and sweet.
Speed up your site
If you load up your site with images it will slow your site down dramatically. Optimize your images. You don’t need every image to be 24 megabytes and 7000 pixels wide. Most WordPress websites limit to your uploads to 2mb. Your images shouldn’t be bigger than 1000 pixels and most templates have your text area sized to 750 pixels. So think small.
Now another thing to think about is your WordPress setup. Is it responsive, aka mobile friendly. How will it act on a mobile device? You need to take this very seriously because Google does and it will kick the crap out of your site. In a hurry. There are plugins to help with most of your speed issues which we will cover later. But if you don’t know how fast your site is there are two places to check. First is GTMetrix. Second is Google Page Speed Insights. These two places will show you where your failing in the speed of your site. Plus it will give you tips to fix it. If you are above 5 seconds of load time you and me need to have a talk and do that here. More than likely you will need to optimize your images. Everyone fails on images.
That’s it. Simple right? It does not take much to fix your bounce rate you just need to do some leg work. Or you can hire me and I will do it. As long as you give me the content.