80% Bounce Rate.. Any ideas why?

[winefolly]

I launched at the beginning of the year and get about 7k uniques a month with about 50 or so unique pages. (Just in case sample size is maybe an issue?)

Anyhow, here is an example page, it has about 1200 uniques and a bounce rate of 90%

http://winefolly.com/update/calories-in-wine/

Any ideas why? A lot of traffic comes from social media right when the post comes out, maybe they are looking and leaving?

[PeterM22]

Yes possibly..Make sure your titles are awesome and eye catching, this can help a lot. Perhaps add a "related posts" plugin to wordpress. That will give people more places to go after they have read your posts.

[jumpdates]

Yes, I agree with PeterM22.

You need to know that most people that come to the site will have some passing interest on this subject. You need to provide some good links (internally to other parts of your site) and some other 'call to action' in the upper fold of the page. This will probably tickle the fancy of most viewers and have good click thrus whereas the die hard readers will scroll down to read more.

[polarking]

I would say it is your layout. You may want to bring some text closer to the top that would captivate the visitor to keep reading and clicking around.

[winefolly]

The related post plugin is installed at the bottom. Do you think it should be moved up higher? Or put in the sidebar maybe?

I can see the value of adding some internal linking higher in the text body maybe to related posts.

[winefolly]

Do you think I have too much header? Or maybe the initial picture takes up too much space? Or are you referring to the sidebar?

[EGOL]

I would bet big money that Todd is right.   When I landed I was thinking.... "Huh?  Where's the content?"

These pages are really lean above the fold.   Lots of wasted space.   Huge gutter at the top, lots of redundant, and big eye sinks on the right and left.

I would frame the page and get some darker solid-color background around the design to hold eyes in on the content.

[goodlegaladvice]

Though I would say the main reason why you have a bad bounce rate is the source of the traffic if they were coming through a targeted keyword from google you would have a better bounce rate. So you have to put something at the top to get a visitors interest.  but if your traffic is anyone like me (don't drink) they just bounce because of the topic.

[winefolly]

The social media traffic is from our subscriber base (and anyone they share to) and the rest is from google keyword traffic.

Mostly all wine people, all organic adoption.

Hopefully these people subscribed to something they wanted to see, good idea though!

[jpgprinting]

I think also the folding of the page, there is nothing interesting and you can only see the top of the first image, you also need to think about that, not everybody has a big screen, check your Google Analytics.  Try to move everything up and play with the empty spaces.

Also check your marketing campaign maybe your are promoting to the wrong audience.

I hope this help.