Hi Jenna - Nice website by the way...
If you hadn't changed your homepage at the point when the bounce rate increased, then this is more likely to be a result of a change in the type of people visiting the site rather than a problem with the the site itself.
For example, your post here here could have been viewed by thousands of people, and many of them may have clicked on the link, but because we are all more interested in stupid cars than your excellent photography, it's unlikely that any of us will delve in further than the first page and will therefore bounce out, having had a quick look at what it is you do.
A few things to check in Google Analytics:
- Look in your referrers and see whether there has been an increase in traffic at the same time from a particular source or sources and see if that is causing the rise in bounce rate because of the low quality of referrals.
- Make sure that it is actually the homepage where the bounces are being generated from not another page which has been picked up by google for some random, but popular search term which is nothing to do with your business.
- Check your referrers for google images - this might be a particular issue with the type of website you have, as when you do a google image search, you can view the page the image is listed on (triggering a hit on your website), but most people are just looking for specific free pics, so will bounce off quite quickly.
If you are seeing a general slow rise in bounce rate over time, then this is often the result of good SEO. If you are attracting more people via search, then there will also be more people who aren't actually interested in specifically what you do.
Changing the homepage to improve bounce stats can be counter-productive - you could reduce it further by having nothing on the homepage but a single button saying "this way to my site" - then your bounce rate will be lower, but the customer experience is poorer as a result and you've not actually done anything to benefit your business...
One thing I always say to people is that you must focus on numbers of enquiries/sales/leads only - anything else in Google Analytics is there just to support that one overriding statistic...
Hope this helps
[advice comes with no warranty!]
