Getting a lot of bounces? Are people abandoning your contact forms?
Getting traffic is great, but it’s no good if people leave your site right away, or can’t find what they want. If you’re having these problems, here are seven things that may be going wrong with your website marketing (and tips for how to fix them).
1. Your email address is hidden.
Make it easy to contact you. Yes, you may get spam, but as Seth said today, “finding customers is harder than filtering spam.”
2. Your website contact form is broken.
The information field is too small and it asks too many questions. The more fields, the fewer people will fill out the form.
3. You’ve got typos and grammatical errors.
If your website looks like the sign in this post, it’s making you look dumb. Find the typos and fix them. Get someone new (with good English skills) to check your site.
4. The links don’t work and there are broken images.
There are tools you can use to check this (especially helpful if you have a big site). Here’s a free link checking tool.
5. The headlines are a snooze.
Award-Winning Videographer is great for you, but it doesn’t tell the customer how you can solve their problem.
6. It doesn’t address objections.
I saw a web site recently that offered a product without a guarantee and no return policy (if it didn’t work). Explain what you’re offering (here’s the video about it), what it will do, and why it’s important to act quickly.
7. It’s hard to find anything.
Watch a new visitor use your web site. Is everything clear? Or are they struggling? If your site is hard to use, people won’t use it (they’ll just leave).
Hi Jodi- Thanks for this. These pieces may seem like intuitive steps but so few people actually use them. It’s amazing. Have you had any experience with small changes that reduce bounce rates on blogs? I’ve been considering a few changes to my own blog but appreciate any insight you can provide.
Jane,
A couple of reasons for a high bounce rate:
1) Your page isn’t relevant to what the person was searching for (my post comparing the cable company to the witch in Snow White gets a lot of traffic from people looking for a photo of the witch).
2) It’s too hard to find what they want (the navigation is confusing, there’s a Flash intro), etc.
The key is to make sure you understand the purpose of your blog (blogging for newbies, vegetarian cooking, etc), know what drove people to it, and think about what they need in order to get what they want.
Much more on this, from someone who works for Google, on the Occam’s Razor blog. Check out this post:
http://tinyurl.com/high-bounce-rates
Jodi, that’s a pretty good roundup of some common areas that many people overlook. One of the things in particular that really frustrates me is when the comment form on someone’s site is non-functional. It just takes a minute to test, yet so many people tend to overlook it.
That frustrates me too. I used to try to track down broken links (and fix them) manually. Now, I have a tech wizard!