People are visiting your website but are they staying long enough?
Visitors entering your website but leaving without any form of interaction can happen because of different reasons:
- They didn’t find the information they were looking for.
- The site isn’t as engaging as it should be.
- The site took too long to load.
This doesn’t have to be the case, though.
By optimizing your website for better user experience and engagement, you can increase a user’s average time on a page. This refers to how long users spend on a single page.
To maximize the time users spend on your pages, follow these best practices:
1. Write Engaging Content
There’s a reason content is hailed king by SEO services providers - it’s what drives search users to visit a website.
But, this doesn’t mean your website should only have a wall of text. You need to make your content engaging, unique, and relevant to your visitors so they have a reason to stay on your website.
You can make your content engaging by:
- Writing attractive headlines: Your content should match the title. You can be creative with your headlines, but make sure the content delivers what’s on the title.
- Making content more scannable: Nobody likes reading walls of text. Use bullet points and subheadings to break long blog posts into easier-to-digest content.
- Designing your content based on the buyer’s journey: Understand that not all users have the same intent when they land on a page. This is why you need to write content that addresses the needs of customers in their stage of the buyer’s journey.
Optimizing content doesn’t only help in increasing the average user time on a page but also helps in ranking the website.
2. Use Videos to Drive More Engagement
Statistics show that videos are the most preferred form of media in content marketing.
Videos make it easier for users to understand your content. These serve as supplementary materials to existing content on the page, which give users more context.
Don’t worry about creating videos. You can start by repurposing existing blog posts and using them as material for your video content.
If you don’t have a videographer who can help with your video content creation, you can use a video creation app such as Biteable to make short, engaging videos minus the fuss.
3. Integrate Chatbots
Think of your website as a substitute for a physical storefront but even better. Instead of having defined business hours, you can stay open to customers 24/7.
The problem is you may not always be available to answer their queries, especially if you’re catering to customers in different timezones.
This is where chatbots become helpful.
Chatbots provide you with another way to communicate with your site visitors. The best thing about using these is you can set conversations based on the frequently asked questions of your customers.
You can use chatbots for:
- Providing customer support: Automate communication with customers and improve response times.
- Sharing educational content: Help customers understand the value of your service by using chatbots to prompt customers with educational content and tutorials.
By integrating chatbots, customers can get the answers they need immediately and help them better navigate your site.
4. Improve User Experience
A huge chunk of why visitors leave websites is because of bad user experience. In fact, 38% of online users will stop engaging with a site that has a cluttered or unattractive layout.
This simply means one thing: If you want customers to stay on your webpages, give them a great user experience.
Do a quick website audit to identify which areas need improvement. This will help you identify the appropriate actions to improve your webpages.
Watch out for:
- Slow website loading speed
- Broken links
- Pages that are not responsive
- Images not optimized with proper alt tags and sizes
- Complicated navigation
The sooner you fix your website with help from a digital services provider, the more opportunities you can get users to stay.
5. Improve Internal Linking
Internal links help Google identify the connection between different pages. If you link properly and strategically across different pages, you can send page authority to important pages on the site.
However, SEO is not the only reason to do internal linking as part of your on-page best practices.
By having internal links, this helps customers visiting your website establish a contextual relationship between different pages.
For instance, if an internal link takes them to a related blog post about a particular service, this makes it easier for them to understand how that service works.
Pro-tip: Don’t link to pages randomly. Follow a structure and start with your top-performing pages. Do your keyword research and determine which terms you will use as anchor texts.
6. Add a Special Offer
Sometimes, a little bit of convincing is all you need to get them to stay.
The question is - what can you offer so they won’t leave immediately?
You can have free downloadable content as a special offer. Think of something that will be useful to them, such as a free template, ebook, or guide.
With these special offers, you can increase the time they spend on your pages. Better yet, they may even come back for more information.
Pro-tip: Use a pop-up banner that appears just when they’re about to leave the page.
7. Reinforce Call to Action Prompts
You want visitors to convert as much as you want them to stay on your page. After all, what is traffic if you can’t convert them?
This is why you need a strong call to action on important pages and blog posts. A well-thought-out call to action can increase clicks to your pages and give them a reason to convert.
The best places to put your CTAs are:
- Above the fold: Let your customers know what promise you can deliver and what action you want them to take right from the very beginning of the page.
- Below the fold: Having a CTA below the fold helps you stay on top of mind of visitors as they browse through the page.
- At the end of a blog post: After reading your content, what’s the next step? Add a CTA to prompt your visitors to contact you or subscribe to your mailing list.
When creating a call to action, be sure to deliver on your promise. If your CTA is “Call Us”, this should direct your visitors to a page with your contact information. Otherwise, the experience will be broken.
Final Thoughts
Getting visitors to stay longer on your site maximizes your capability to show what your business can offer.
It goes beyond that, though.
Improving the overall experience of your visitors not only helps you rank better on search results, but also gets you more customers.
Start with the recommendations above and see how the average time of users will improve over time.