Posted 23.01.2020
By Luke Pickering
Sometimes you can feel like you’re being left behind. When you see your competitors have changed their site you can feel an urge to change and update yours too. More often than not, that won’t be necessary. If anything, this is only going to negatively affect you. It’s important to invest in your website, making changes when you know that your website users will benefit from it.
Resist the urge to keep up with the Jones’, and instead update your website when is necessary. But when is that?
Your bounce rate is the number of people who come to your site and then leave without engaging in your site in any way, this includes visiting another page. There are several reasons why you might have a high bounce rate and very few of them are good. Yes, it could be because they have gone to your site and found exactly what they were looking for, however, it could also be because they can’t find what they’re looking for, your site took too long to load or they simply just don’t like the look of your page. There are several factors you should look at before jumping to conclusions:
It is more likely that your new visitors are going to have a higher bounce rate as they’ll be less familiar with your brand and website. If this is the case maybe look at seeing what you could do to grab their attention and tempt them into engaging with the site for longer.
If you’re a local business serving only to a national level, then it is expected that you’ll have a high bounce rate of customers from outside of the UK. So be careful when looking at the data to ensure that your traffic isn’t being skewed by irrelevant visits. You can do this by filtering your Google Analytics data to see the individual bounce rate of users from different locations.
We’ll go into this in a bit more depth further in this post, but people using different devices are going to have different intentions. If you’re searching on your mobile it is possible that your bounce rate would be quite high as most people on mobile are looking for information fast whereas people on desktop are much more likely to be browsing.
Let’s face it no one likes a slow website. Your websites loading speed is going to play a big factor in whether someone stays or someone goes. The loading speed is almost like your first impression, if your page is taking too long to load you’re going to drive traffic away. The average loading time on a mobile landing page is 15.3 seconds, whereas the average for desktop is only 3.21 seconds. Optimising your site so that it loads quicker is going to be a pleasant surprise for visitors, it is therefore, likely to decrease your bounce rate and increase your average session duration. If it is taking too long maybe it is time for an update. See how our team can help improve your website…
In the 21st century with mobile traffic accounting for approximately half of all web traffic, it should be common practice to be making your website mobile-friendly. If you’re not making your website suitable for mobile, it’s less likely your customers are going to trust you as for most they will be expecting your page to be optimised for handheld viewing.
What about your competitors? If their sites are mobile-ready, it’s even more important yours is so that you can compete within the SERPs. In this digital age, we expect everything instantly online. So you can’t afford to have a website that takes too long to load as customers are going to click off your page without a second thought. Optimise your website for mobile use, and make it sharp!
It’s key now more than ever as before indexing used to be done solely on the desktop version of your webpage however, Google has since introduced mobile-first indexing. What this means for you is that your ranks are going to be determined on how well your site performs on mobile first. So it is equally important for the user, as it is for your business that you make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. If you want to learn more about how it all works you can read more about mobile indexing in our post.
People come to your page to find something, whether it be an answer to their question, or to find a product. The content on your page should be considered to be one of the most important things, as it helps to determine how effective your website is. Updating your website with fresh and unique content is a key factor in driving people to revisit your site more often. Maybe it’s time to include interactive content, video or just rewrite your page content.
When it comes to writing your content it’s important that you think about SEO and targetting the correct keywords into your content. Strategically creating content is going to help you rank higher in SERPs and helping you to drive more traffic. You need to be making sure you’re offering the most value to the people coming to your website, if they’re on your site they obviously want something, so make sure you’re giving it to them.
Are you giving your customers the most you can when they come to your site? Take a look at your analytics and look out for the above, if this seems to be you then maybe it is time for an update. If you would like some help to decide whether it is time for an update or just help to update your page then don’t hesitate to get in touch here…
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