Are visitors navigating past your home page?
You may have heard of something called a BOUNCE RATE when people talk about website stats. It may be one of the mystical phrases that web designers talk about that actually means nothing to most business owners. Basically a bounce rate is how many people land on your website and then leave instantly – they just bounce off your website
This may be hard for you to gauge unless you have special analytics software running on your site that lets you see what visitors are doing. Google Analytics is excellent in this case and is free to sign up and put on your site. If you have Google Analytics or another service, look through your stats to see if people are navigating deeper into your site. Often, there are metrics and things already calculated for you to tell you this, but if not then take a look at the last couple of weeks worth of visitors.
If you are starting to lose visitors, then you should either take a look at your home page to see if you can make it more enticing, or consider a complete redesign of your site to make visitors want to navigate further into your site and read what you have to say.
Is your site slowly losing visitors over time?
Very closely related to finding out if visitors are navigating past your home page is to see if there is a slowing trend in visitors coming to your site at all. Are you finding that visitors are not coming as often as they had before? If so you may want to consider revamping either the content on your site or your entire site to entice more visitors to come and visit.
While having a slowing trend in visitors may not mean a complete redesign is necessary, it is often a good indicator that either your SEO is not working for you or your site is becoming stale. More than likely the latter of the two. When your site starts looking like it hasn’t been updated in a while, visitors will be turned off and will go elsewhere for their needs. Search engines will also not rank you favorably in this case either, as they like sites that are constantly being updated with new content.
Of course all this is dependant on one very important factor – does your website have any means of tracking your website’s traffic? If not then maybe you need to talk to a website designer who can help you so you can monitor your sites performance.
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