why do i have a high bounce rate?

[mudskippa26962]

Hi everyone,

I run a site on addiction recovery and I know there is a load of good info on there etc but even when people come to my site from really appropriate search phrases and terms and get to my articles, quite often the bounce rate is 100% and the time spent on the site is 0 seconds!

http://www.smyls.co.uk

What is wrong with my site?? Is it slow loading? Badly presented? What?

I'd love your feedback!
Thanks,Beth

[miguelkp]

Time spent on the site is 0 seconds? It sounds like an error while metering. Or maybe some kind of spider-bots that just try to index your website's data (still, 0 seconds is too low even for spiders, I think).

[bulletcleaners25]

Ive been trying to get my bounce rate down aswell and it's slowly going down. The first thing I did was find out how people were getting to my site and possible reason why they would leave straight away. A few reasons:

1. they didn't find the appropriate information they were looking for or they wanted more detail.
2. my layout didn't suit the theme of my business, I had a dark theme and I own a cleaning business, so I redesigned it to have a lighter background.
3. this is more related to my site, but people from different countries were coming when I only service my local area.

There were a few others but I cant think of them from the top of my head.

Do you use google analytics? check that your code is correct, try re uploading it again.

[mudskippa26962]

Thanks guys, but i just found some info. Google Analytics lists anyone that only visits one page of the website as 0 seconds, no matter how long they spent on that page. For some reason it can only measure the amount of time if more than one page is looked at, so if they only go to one page 0 seconds is what shows up. Phew! That is a relief

[dragonpimpsta]

I'm not an alcoholic or in need of therapy but I have a few ideas why your bounce rate is so high.

1. Mainly, I feel like too much information is put in front of me at once. It makes it hard for me to focus on what the point of the website is.
2. Then I tried to read the page but then I felt like you were trying to sell me on a product scam or something.

I would clean up the layout by
1. getting rid of the blog & news (just move it to another page or something)
2. rephrasing the first page with your instroduction first (my name is beth) then afterwards the "Are you lost" stuff. Makes it seem more personable in my opinion
3. just simplify things a little more

thats my opinion. also im a fan of NLP