7 Things that Could be Turning Your Website Visitors Off

Your website could be an important source of revenue for your business. If your website has elements that are turning people off and preventing them from buying, it’s important to try to change that.

If you regularly analyze your website traffic reports, something important to consider is your bounce rate.  A bounce rate can be very telling.  It is the rate of visitors who leave the same page they entered on.  In essence, there was something on the landing page that made the visitor leave. Either they didn’t find what they wanted or something turned them ‘off’ and made them leave.

Even if you’re great at attracting traffic it won’t do much good if people don’t click past the first page.  And search engines such as Google also consider bounce rates when they measure websites so a high bounce rate could begin to translate to lost traffic because you could slowly slide down the search engine results pages.  Here are some things to check:

1. Look at keyword reports.  Are the keyword phrases people use to land on your site accurate in their representation of what the page is about? A bit of tweaking could be in order.
2. Check the sales copy on the pages that people land on.  Is there something missing? Is the page a ‘dead end’ in that it doesn’t adequately lead people with a call to action?
3. Check how long it takes your site to load. If it takes too long due to the layout it could result in people leaving the page before it fully loads.
4. Make sure you check your site on multiple internet browsers.  Maybe it’s not displaying properly on Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.
5. Check how your site looks on a mobile phone. A lot of website owners forget about mobile visitors. If you don’t have a version of your site that fits on an iPhone, Blackberry or similar screen you could lose out on great potential.
6. Check your competition’s websites. Look at the other top results for specific keyword phrases and see how the competition stacks up. If their pricing page looks a lot better than your pricing page, or instance, people could be abandoning your page.
7. Another area to consider, if you have an e-commerce site, is your checkout page.  If people often abandon their cart, you may want to look closely at your checkout process as something could be preventing people from buying.

In a nutshell, your goal should be to continually boost your conversion rate and to systemically lower the bounce rate of your site’s pages.  Continuous improvement principles can translate to continuous growth of profit for your website.