6 Reasons Visitors Hate Your Website
 

Another fantastic read from Search Engine Land | Must Read News About SEO, SEM & Search Engines

?Should I stay or should I go?? It?s a decision that most visitors subconsciously make when landing on your website. The time you have to capture their interest is brief, and their willingness to stay is affected by various factors. What exactly can you do to guarantee that they don?t bounce?

The majority of website visitors are just flat-out annoyed. Therefore, it is important to create a careful design and strategic content strategy to avoid any failures. We?ve rounded up the six main factors that influence a visitor?s experience on your site:

Mobile Design
Impact: High Bounce Rate

More searches take place on mobile devices than on desktop computers. Consequently, a poor mobile design can fluster visitors and drive them back to Google search to find another source. This increases your website?s bounce rate. Consider your consumer?s mobile needs, and decide whether to go for adaptive vs. responsive mobile design. Then evaluate your font size, hyperlinks (opening in a new tab or window), page navigation and other key website components.

Click-bait Articles
Impact: High Bounce Rate, Low Social Shares

Click-bait articles boast misleading headlines with unrelated content. Efforts that focus purely on earning visits end up disappointing readers and will result not only in a high bounce rate, but also low social shares. Instead, provide valuable, keyword-friendly articles that readers will share on social media.

Pop-ups
Impact: Low Returning Visitors

If your home page greets visitors with flashy pop-ups, users may well click out of the pop-up, and subsequently, your website. For any call to action (CTA), think like a person you?re trying to engage, not like a business. Email signups at the top of the page welcome visitors without offending. Or try a floating button to ?Sign up for the newsletter.? If you?re running pop-up ads, consider the ad?s design. An ?X? in the corner to close out the ad is intuitive, whereas ?not right now? underneath the pop-up can look spammy. Then think of traffic sources. Search visitors who are looking for quick information will respond poorly to content blocked by ads. Calculate the ROI of pop-up ads versus the respect you could gain from visitors and search engines.

Confusing Content
Impact: Misleading Time-On-Site Figures

While traffic may be your motive, your priority is good, relevant content. Providing weak or confusing content will only discredit your website as a source. Verbose articles discourage visitors looking for concise explanations. This is true for both B2C and B2B-focused websites, which focus more on describing products and services. Despite the chance for a longer time on site, long, confusing content will be less likely to lead to a conversion (whether it?s a purchase or a contact form submission).

Slow Speed
Impact: Low Conversion Rate

Many users will leave your site before it even loads; page speed affects conversions. After all, 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even worse, depending on site speed, visits may not even be registered by Google Analytics. If your website cannot efficiently respond to web requests, Google will penalize it. Find resources to determine and improve your site speed by visiting Google?s PageSpeed tools.

Low-Quality Images and Phony Stock Photos

Technology and visual creativity in media have raised user expectations for imagery on websites. Think about the number of visuals a person sees every day and how your images compare.

Low-resolution images and phony stock photos look gimmicky and threaten your website?s professionalism. Don?t settle for a low number of return visitors and a decrease in referral traffic; rather, invest in visual talent and tools, such as Canva, for creating custom images.

There?s a direct correlation between the reasons why people hate your website and the negative impact on your SEO/SEM efforts. Keeping searcher intent and user experience in mind during web creation and conducting ongoing quality control tests will keep your website on track with performance goals and improve overall experience.

Really liked to read through this. Knew some of them, other where more interessting. Anyway, good work :thumbsup

Good post.

:thumbsup

Great thread!

Another thing that bugs the hell out of me that I've been noticing a lot of lately with clickbait type articles is when it's a list of something but they spread the article out over like 50 pages. Each page has a photo and a few sentences and you have to wait for each new page to load to see the next bit (which usually takes a while since these are almost always loaded with ads). This is especially annoying on mobile. If I notice that an article is laid out that way and doesn't have an option to view as one page, I leave immediately.

If an article has relevant info, all on one page, and not too many ads, I'm more likely to stay, share, and even return to read more good articles.

Interesting information, thanks!

My sites are all designed with user interactivity and long term growth in mind.

No reason to focus on spurring banners all over the place as itlesds to the disintegration of your assets.

Just love all the information you share with all webmasters. You could of course keep all this information for yourself, but you choose to share with us all. This deserves a Thank You.

Yes, but what the site owners are usually doing here is trying to get you to click on AdSense. The arrow in the AdSense ad looks a lot like a Next Button. Hence they put the AdSense where you'd expect the next photo button to be. As with all these things, I expect it works best for them in terms of site revenue.