10 Reasons For Short Site Visits
As we kick off 2023 it’s a good idea to tighten up your online presence and your website is a great place to start. Let’s start with getting more quality eyeballs on your content. When you look at your website stats, do you see a lot of bounces or short visits? There are 10 reasons why that might be happening, and unfortunately, most of them are bad. Here we go.
1. The Visitor Was A Bot
A Web crawler’s primary role is to crawl through web pages across the Internet to mine and gather data for search engines. A study found that only 59% of traffic to a website comes from humans, while 25% are bad bots and 15% are considered good bots. The Googlebot and Bingbot are considered good bots, and while bad bots aren’t necessarily harmful, they’re still considered bad if they devour bandwidth and server resources.
2. Your Home Page Received Paid Traffic
Paid traffic means that you’re running ads somewhere online either for your music or merch. That’s not bad in itself, but you want to create a dedicated landing page to send this traffic to, since a home page usually isn’t specific enough to provide the info that a visitor directed from an ad might need, therefore the short stay.
3. The Page Took Too Long To Load
Site visitors aren’t patient and will skip to something new if they have to wait too long. You want to make your page lean and mean with fast loading graphics and a streamlined server so that won’t become a problem.
4. The Page Doesn’t Have A Call-To-Action
You managed to get this person to your site, now what? Help guide your visitors by telling them what you want from them (Buy It Now, Download Here, Click For More Info). They won’t stick around otherwise.
5. The Page Content Is Confusing
Visitor’s don’t read in a linear fashion reading every word from top to bottom like we might expect. Instead they tend to scan content and scroll up and down, mostly taking notice of headings, bold text, bulleted lists, and links. Paying attention to page formatting by keeping the paragraphs short with lots of headings, lists and images is the key.
6. Irrelevant Content
Google rewards websites for good content and punishes them for irrelevant content because it’s the user experience that counts. If a visitors comes to your page expecting to find certain information and is met with something completely different, that’s irrelevant, and a major reason why people leave quickly.
7. You Have Annoying Popup Windows
Everyone hates popup windows but the fact of the matter is that they work. The key is how the pop is timed, since popups that load immediately are rarely a good idea as it may cause a visitor to quit the page immediately.
8. The Site Isn’t Mobile Responsive
In this day and age there’s no excuse for this. Most people will consume your content on their phone so it pays to take extra care that it looks good and works well on that device.
9. The Navigation Is Confusing
All access points to other pages on your site should be clearly marked and easy to find. It’s frustrating when confronted with embedded menus that don’t stay open long enough to click on an item.
10. The Visitor Found The Information They Wanted.
Finally we get to a good one. Your visitor found exactly the information they wanted quickly and easily, the best-case scenario.
Websites are fairly easy to create these days, so it pays to take the extra time working out the tips above to keep the short site visits to a minimum. Even if you hire someone to build a site for you, keep these in mind while proofing the site. It really makes a difference.
