Three Symptoms of a Poorly Performing Website

Ron Akanowicz

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June 24, 2009

Three Symptoms of a Poorly Performing Website

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There are many reasons why employing a content strategist can help your website- from managing your content workflow to assessing your competitors content. But often times an organization feels just because there is content on the site that everything is okay. That may work for a while, until you start to see a measurable decline in its vital signs. Consider these three symptoms of a poorly performing website and how they could related to a lack of content strategy:content strategy diagnosis

  • You have a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter and exit the same page without visiting other pages on your site. Are you including intra-text links within the content? Is the content formatted  for readability? Can visitors see the relationships among the various kinds of content available?
  • You have low conversion rates or low search engine ranking. Your message needs to be clear and understandable in order for visitors and potential clients to act. Does your content engage and influence your visitors? Likewise, each piece of content that’s published on the site needs to support your SEO strategy. Do your content writers know how to integrate SEO into the content?
  • You receive calls and emails asking the same questions about your products or services. Visitors may not be getting answers to their questions about your product or service from the existing content. Is your content complete? Appropriate to your site audience? Written and formatted to increase information scent?

    • A content strategist may not be solely responsible for fixing these problems. It takes cooperation among the information architects, developers, subject matter experts, and others stakeholders to create a truly great website. Focusing on the content early and often will increase the site’s chances for success and help you to avoid some of the symptoms listed above.

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    Mark (not verified) July 8, 2009

    In my experience a high bounce rate often means that a site has not been built with users in mind. A good site design will have thought about the main reasons why a visitor will use the site and it will have clear channels and content for each of those visitor occasions. A poor site design will produce an online brochure that will quickly be abandoned.

    railmeat (not verified) June 27, 2009

    I am sure you are right that a high bounce rate is a sign of problems on a site, but what is an acceptable bounce rate? How much it too high? Of course it must vary by site.

    Gregory Heller June 30, 2009

    Bounce rate alone does not necessarily mean your site is not performing. It is true that for many sites you will want people to "stick around" and a high bounce rate indicates that people are not.  However some sites provide targeted information and users land on those pages from google searches, get their information, and leave.

    So depending on your site's objective, if you want your visitors to stick around, then you should be looking for a bounce rate below 50%.  If your visitors are coming for specific information -- get in and get out -- then a rate in the 70% range is not unacceptable.