Engagement! Everyone wants engagement from their website. The problem is that we are not completely certain of the best way to acquire it. Marketing is more art than science when it comes to engagement.
What is the point of having a website if you do not maintain its usefulness over time? Your website provides information about your products or services. Thus, it is now imperative to ensure that visitors are reading the information you provide.
As part of its tracking system, Google keeps track of the length of time visitors spend on your website, the pages they visit, the number of interactions, as well as other metrics. This information provides information about how useful and informative your website is compared to those of your competitors. Useful websites perform better in search engine results.
However, there are certain patterns of success that can be examined despite the lack of formulas. As part of this article, we will discuss five things you can do to increase website engagement, or visitor engagement, otherwise known as optimizing the user experience on your website.
1. Engage Visitors With Relevant, Engaging Website Content
During the past few years, search engine optimization has increasingly focused on content creation. The quality of content on websites suffered as webmasters and professional SEO agencies strived to rank better with more content, more pages, and larger websites. Approximately 30% of the internet content on the internet is duplicate, i.e., duplicate content, which involves rewriting or "spinning" information so that it appears like a completely different article, yet it contains the same information as any other website.
A visitor's attention span and comprehension abilities are being shortened as they become more accustomed to viewing images, graphics, and videos rather than lengthy articles. Provide information as quickly and simply as possible to enhance visitor engagement on your website. In addition, the information should be broken up so it does not appear overwhelming.
To make the content easy to read, it should be well written. Make sure that you segment your content into digestible chunks using clear, easy-to-understand headings (H1, H2, H3 tags). You may also want to consider designing a large page that includes "jump" or "hot" links to assist visitors in selecting the areas they are interested in reading. By doing this, you will enhance the customer experience, time spent on your website, and perception of the site.
The purpose of our website is to convey useful information as quickly as possible in small chunks. As you share information in a simple and intuitive manner, the greater is the probability that visitors will stay on your site and view the content. A variety of media types such as audio and video clips, images, infographics, and slideshows can be used to break up text and convey relevant information more easily to readers.
2. Engage With Visitors Personally
Considering you want to increase user engagement, you may wish to consider utilizing various tools that can assist you in communicating with visitors to your store. Hundreds of ecommerce companies today utilize chat plugins such as WhatsApp chat buttons, Chatbots, and Facebook Messenger applications so store managers can directly assist customers.
You can enhance the engagement of your end-users and build trust and loyalty among your customers when you integrate chat plugins into your store. Many store admins hide product price and prompt customers to reach their sales staff via call or form as a way to increase customer engagement. When they inquire about the product price, the sales team can market to then more of their products, services, or deals.
3. A Responsive Website Is A Must
Nowadays, internet browsing is no longer conducted exclusively on a desktop computer. Currently, more people than ever before are accessing the internet using mobile devices, so if you force your visitors to pinch and scroll their way around your site, you are telling them to look elsewhere. You must ensure that your website, regardless of its complexity, is accessible and comfortable to view on a variety of devices, including smaller mobile handsets.
4. Promote A Sense Of Community
A community on your website can help start a conversation and increase traffic to your website. This is because people are interested in contributing their opinion on topics they feel passionate about. Provide commenting functionality through third-party solutions such as Facebook comments or Disqus, or provide a dedicated forum for visitors to answer questions. However, it is also essential that you manage your community in order to ensure that proper standards of decorum are maintained.
5. Speed Up The Loading Of Pages
It is likely that you are familiar with slow-loading pages. You find an interesting website and then click on the link only to wait while it loads. It is more likely that you leave the website because waiting and waiting is infuriating. According to a study conducted by Soasta, simply a one-second increase in page loading speed can result in a 56% increase in bounce rates. Such a trend would be detrimental to website user engagement.
Try to load your website within two seconds by using a free tool such as Pingdom. Otherwise, you should eliminate unnecessary elements from your pages in order to improve the loading speed. Incorporate images into your posts to make them more engaging, but limit the number of images per post in order to speed up the loading process. It is a good idea to convert your images to webp format as it reduces the image size without losing its quality. It is also possible to download plugins that ensure that images are only loaded when readers scroll to the specified area.
6. Email Marketing Must Not Be Neglected
The majority of companies are so focused on gaining new customers through content marketing that more traditional marketing methods are often overlooked. The use of email marketing can be a powerful tool, and a moderately successful email campaign can generate substantial traffic growth. Please note that you should refrain from sending out emails about every single update to your company. Do not overlook the power of word-of-mouth marketing, particularly if your products or services are already liked by others. You can also increase your traffic by sending a friendly email reminder about a new service or product.
7. Start Writing Guest Posts
Despite what you may have been told, true guest blogging is not dead. You can increase your blog traffic and establish your brand by securing a guest post on a reputable website. However, you should be aware that guest blogging standards have changed considerably over the past 18 months, and spammy tactics may result in severe punishment. Use caution when approaching guest blogging opportunities.
8. Invite guest bloggers to your site
A guest blog is a two-way street. Aside from posting content on other blogs, you should invite people in your niche to blog on your own site. Your guest article will likely be shared and linked to, which will bring new readers to your website. Do not post low quality, spammy links to your website, since Google is cracking down on low-quality guest blogging.
9. Easy Checkout
A complex checkout process in online commerce stores typically harms the business and the experience of the customer. Therefore, make sure that the process of placing orders and checking out your store's products is as simple as possible to avoid excessive cart abandonment.
10. Take Down Email Addresses
Engaging with a new user on a website is not just about engaging with them once. It also involves your ability to maintain their interest. By collecting their email address, you will be able to send them the latest content updates.
11. Promote contests or giveaways
There is no better way to improve your performance than contests and giveaways. The benefits include page views, subscriptions, conversions, and user engagement. Make sure you create giveaways in a way that rewards users for taking certain actions. You could, for example, give rewards for referrals, content shares, social media likes, or product reviews/testimonials.
Summary
User engagement on a website is an important component in determining the outcome of a business, so you should use the above tips to your advantage. Instead of simply selecting one, run tests to determine what works best for your website design. Therefore, you should focus on making your website attractive, interactive, and user-friendly to encourage visitors to stay on your site longer and view more pages. Google’s ranking algorithm does consider website usage metrics like time on site and pages visited. If a visitor leaves your site quickly, this is considered a “bounce” and is an indicator to Google that your site is not as useful as other available websites. As a result, your website moves down in the rankings. On the flip side, having a fast, responsive website that is easy to navigate and contains useful information will encourage users to stay engaged on your site, which will reduce bounce rates and help improve search engine rankings.