Website user engagement is a good determinant of the success and ranking of your site. High website visits and engagement means you’re doing something right, while low engagement statistics are an indicator that it’s time for improvements to give your product or service a fighting chance in the market.
Engaging visitors is the crucial first step in the conversion process because you must engage your audience before you can convince them to take an action, like buy or subscribe.
Here are tips on how to increase your website’s visitors and engagements.
Website Design
The first thing to consider is the design of your website. This is the foundation on which all other adjustments and techniques geared toward increasing your website’s visitors will be built.
There are different web design systems, each with different layout considerations that must correspond with your product or service. For example, the folks at junocreative.net.au have an interesting post that explains professional web design systems. From the nuances of content management systems to e-commerce systems.
Make Your Site Load Faster
Research conducted has revealed that a page loading a mere one second slower than average can experience a 56% increase in the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page, also known as the bounce rate.
Evidently, a slow-loading webpage is fatal to your site engagement statistics. Conduct a page speed test with free online tools and gauge if your site loads within two seconds. If it doesn’t, here are ways to reduce page load time:
- Optimize the images by removing unnecessary comments, extra space, and unneeded colors from the image source. Also, save images in JPEG format
- Avoid redirects as much as possible because besides reducing loading speeds being redirected to other web pages consumes extra time and frustrates your visitors
- Reduce server response time. Server response time is describing the amount of time spent between the browser request to the server and the final page load. The server response time will depend upon the number of requests by the browsers and your server configurations.
- Download helpful plugins for assistance
Simplify Site Navigation
Another major cause of low website visit engagement is having a site that is difficult to navigate. If visitors are having a hard time finding or accessing the information they need about your products or services from your website, your bounce rate will increase.
You must re-organize your site and pages into a structure that enables users to locate the pages they need with little to no effort.
The characteristics of a poor navigation system include:
- An inaccessible navigation bar. No matter your site style, “sticky navigation”, also known as navigation that stays with you when you scroll, is often very beneficial.
- Poor categorization. While you want to make sure all your most important links are accessible from your main navigation, a giant mess of links won’t help matters. So categorize your like links.
- Hard to find the search box. Ironically, some sites have search boxes you have to find. Add a prominent search box. Plus stick to the general practice of having the search box on the top left because this is where users generally expect to find it
Post Engaging Top Quality Content
Your website’s visibility on search engines will reel in visitors, the visuals will tempt them to stay, but it is good quality content that will keep visitors coming back. Poor quality content hints at a poor-quality product or a poor quality service and should be avoided.
An aspect of quality content is the writing style. The writing style you choose will impact your website user engagement by determining how readers respond to your content.
The two predominant writing styles on the Internet are a friendly, easy-going conversational tone versus a more formal professional tone. While the majority of websites opt for the former quirky and fun informational tone websites, the later formal tone may be better for business websites providing more serious services. This is why knowing your audience is important.
A few good ways to know your audience are through:
- Conducting surveys where you ask them questions about their preferences and what they expect from you. Keep your survey questions short and simple
- User testing where you see how visitors are interacting with your site – whether or not they can easily navigate the site for example
- Live Chat Transcripts because reading back your live chat queries is a great way to detect problem areas
Hold Contest And Giveaways
People respond to any reward-based system, so holding contests with giveaways is one of the best ways to significantly increase website engagement. Plus they’re beneficial to not only user engagement but also page visits, subscriptions, and conversions.
Remember to structure your giveaways in a way in which visitors get the rewards for taking certain actions. For instance, you could offer a reward for every referral, content share, product or service review, social media like or retweet, etc.
Poor visitor engagements and high bounce rates can be disheartening. However, taking actions that work, like making your page load faster, simplifying your navigation system, posting high-quality content, and holding contests and giveaways will have the positive effects of increased engagement.
