Constructive criticism needed (Google analytics bounce ratio)

According to Google analytics my bounce ratio over 80%. I’m looking for some constructive criticism on my home page. The SE visitors coming to my site are targeted, I have what they are looking for so I need to find out why they are not exploring my site.

My questions:
1. Whats wrong with my home page?
2. Is my navigation system ok?
3. How accurate is Google's bounce ratio information?
4. What is a decent bounce ratio?

 

Um, duh, my site is www.nobluff.com

 

OK..here we go.
You have a great domain. I really like it. Your site seems to have decent SEO and PR.
For a gaming site, (and this is gonna hurt) your design is not professional enough.
Your visitors are backing out because the site does not look credible.

Everything about the name is top notch. I really am serious.
You have a five figure name, on a $100 design.
You have to give gamers more than that. I live in Vegas, and The company I work with also has a few Poker domains that make decent money in sign ups, and the designs are not anything over the top, but you have to raise the bar a little.
Getting people to trust you is very big in the world of online, and off line gaming.
Credibility is everything.
Spend some time and money on that, and you will see better conversions.
JMO

 

I guess you can do a better design.....doesn't look very professional
And there are lots of unnecessary things flashing...causes pain in the eyes...

 

Thanks hmansfield and pratikgmr, guess I will go to the buy and sell section (can you recommend anyone?).

I lucked out on the name, I got it using yahoo domains, they gave me suggestions when the domain I was looking for was already taken. When they suggested "nobluff" I took it right away.

 

I concur with the above. My first impression was that the "ads to content" ratio was not good. You have the same ads on either side of the content. Seeing the same ad in close proximity screams "low quality" to me. It tells me that the ad is the most important thing. If i were searching for a site with your theme, I would most likely have clicked right out of it.

You might also want to confirm your "targeted traffic". If you have anything broad matched, you might want to run a search query report and check all the queries that trigger your ad.

 

My immediate impression before I can even notice anything else is far far too much flashing images. I would definetely remove the flashing from the navigation.

The site design isnt very good, if I was searching for something and came across that I wouldn't stay long enough to even see the content, I would immediately be hitting "back" and going elsewhere.

Rather than fix what you have I think a redesign would be an easier and faster solution, if you can't do it yourself I would hire someone here or on rentacoder.com to do the work. Make sure to keep all your filenames the same.

 

Spend a couple hundred dollars on a professionally designed template and you'll do great!

 

I just want to re iterate. Its a great domain!
It will be worth the money to get it designed properly.

 

yes i agree..the domain is great...but man that design: sorry to say: its horrible...everything flashes...try to make a professional design..go to sell/trade forum and hire someone ... but the domain...a great one

 

Hi All,

Got someone to do the design and programming.

The work was done on http://www.nobluff.com/nobluff2/
and I am now bust converting all the other pages to the new design eg (http://www.nobluff.com/nobluff2/other_casino_bonuses - 1 of my money pages)

Thanks to
ironmonk3y and sk8boarder1414 for the quick/quality work.

In my opinion a major improvement on www.nobluff.com

 

Looks a lot better than the old version. Why are you linking to a bunch of wikipedia pages in the footer? Just rewrite their content to get by duplicate content filters, and host the pages on your own site.

 

I thought you needed to link out to "knowledgeable" pages in order to improve your ranking? Wouldn't be the first time I misunderstood thing, did I?

Thanks for all the feedback, hopefully this will improve my bounce ratio.

 

There is no way i would ever link out to wikipedia if I was going to link out to anywhere at all, given that they use "nofollow" on their own links out of their site.

I would say you are far better to have the content on your own site, than linking out to anywhere else. The more pages of unique, decent quality content the better. Content is king!

 

Please send me a PM!
I migth have something interesting for you, and it is hard to tell the reason for bounce rate as it depends on which keuwords you get traffic from! And how you get traffic of course...