Problems with my bounce rate for my site

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi on my site Weight Loss Hypnotherapy site i have a bonce rate off 55.1 where up to now 60 people have stayed on the site for less than one sec and i would like to know how to combat this and how to keep people on the site for longer.

I have tried playing around with the content but i am thinking about adding images to make the page look better but would like the advice from others.

many thanks for your help.

[IKT]

First thing first, where do you get that number from? is it from alexa ? or google analytics ? or any other sources?

In my opinion if you had a bounce rate that high showed up on google analytics, than you really need to made a further research where this bouncing visitors are coming from

Other than that, i would suggest you to improve your overall site design , some of the reason is explained here ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-whiteboard-friday ), a site that looked good potentially attract customer and encourage them to stay a while and surf deeper  .. (unless of course if your website is nike.com , where the brand trust can easily overshadow the lack of good site design)

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Diane

You might want to try some segmenting in analytics to see where the bounce rate is coming from. Is it 60% across the board?  Or can you find places where it is higher/lower than the average by more than 10%?

Some places to start looking for differences would be:

Organic vs direct vs reffering?

New vs return visits?

All keywords or just particular ones?

Then that way, you can determine if your getting poor quality traffic (ie people coming to your site looking for something other than what your site offers).

If the wrong people are finding your site, with the wrong intent, this could skew results.

Also, very important - remember a "bounce" doesn't tell you how long they were on the page.  They could land on the page, stay for 5 minutes and even call the phone number, and then leave the page, and this is all still a bounce. And this particular page seems to give all the information about the topic without necessarily having to navigate around much.

Are you measuring conversions some how on the other end?

-Dan

[kwikle]

Hi Diane,

This page/site has a high level of links to content ratio (especially footer). Images themselves I don't think will do a lot for your bounce rate. Also it doesn't appear to have a very clear value proposition for users on what you are offering. For lack of a better term it looks like spam.  When I looked at results for weight loss hypnotherapy they all seem to look this way too.

If it were me, and I did have a real service, I would probably look at some other industry category type services like massage therapy, or acupuncture, the quality of the presentation looks a lot better and a lot less spammy.

So maybe by cleaning up all the excess linkage, and cleaning up the presentation layer you might get a lot of bounce rate improvement?

Hope that helps.