Boosting Website User Engagement

Regardless of your target market, there’s never going to be a shortage of online competition. You’re always going to be in a continuous fierce battle for the attention of online visitors and you need to be prepared.

All websites are built with a specific purpose in mind, attract new clients, promoting your services or selling your products. Whenever a visitor comes across your website, you want them to take some kind of action.

If a user abandons your site without taking your desired action, it could surely end up a waste opportunity.

For this reason focusing solely on traffic numbers is wasted time. It’s important to focus on other factors such as how engaged your visitors are with your website and how long they’re sticking around to make your desired action.

The more time someone spends on a site, the more likely they are to take the desired action whatever that may be.

How Easy Is It To Navigate Your Website?

First off, a well thought out structured navigation allows your users to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. If they begin to feel as though it’s impossible to find what they’re looking for, frustration will set in and they will abandon your site. (More than likely going to your one of your competitor’s websites). Navigation is about convenience and encouraging your visitors to dive deeper into your site.

Do You Offer Useful Content?

Content should be provided for a clearly defined audience and should be easy to read with clear titles, headlines and subheadings. Content that’s valuable, relevant, and consistent attracts and retains a user’s interest by delivering what they expect to find and need.

Writing with this in mind will guide your readers to know where they should be spending their valuable time. Relevant images also help provide a lot of value. Content statistics have shown that people end up retaining 65% of the information 3 days later if a relevant image is paired with that same information. Researchers have also found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.

Does Your Site Offer Internal Links?

Internal links are not only an important aspect from an SEO perspective but for your sites visitors as well. The purpose of these links are to direct users from one page to the next allowing visitors to easily navigate through your website with ease. Include a hyperlink and relevant anchor text whenever you have the opportunity to reference another post that’s capable of expanding and adding further information on your current topic.

These types of links are valuable for a few reasons:

• They allow users to easily navigate through your website
• They help establish information hierarchy
• They help spread link juice (rank power) throughout your website

Is Your Website Performing Optimally?

Page speed is an important factor when considering your user experience. We know that pages with longer load times tend to have a higher bounce rates and lower than average time spent on the page itself. Page speed is also used by Google for its ranking factors for the simple reason that users don’t interact with slow websites.

If you would like to test your page speed and get insights and information on what to consider fixing, check out Google’s tester here.

Tip: For users to engage with your site the process needs to be fast and efficient!

Does Your Site Have Responsive Design?

With the recent growth in mobile devices and their capabilities, mobile has become a new game changer in the industry and you need to be ready. If you want to survive in the online market place, you’re going to have to adapt. Your website’s visitors are expecting it and chances are your competition has already done it.

Make sure that your pages load quickly as nearly half of your visitors will leave a site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds. If they don’t your visitors could go elsewhere. Also, make sure calls to action, opt-in forms, and contact forms are working properly across all devices.

Test how mobile friendly your website is with Google here.

Have You Checked Your Analytics Data

When trouble shooting for ways to engage your visitors, data found within Analytics can be extremely helpful. Take a look at your top exit pages and pages that have high bounce rates. When you pinpoint the pages that have high bounce rates, try to figure out what can be changed or added on those pages to increase consumer engagement.

Key Takeaway

The ideas covered in this article are pretty simple to implement, but many times they get overlooked. User friendly sites are the first step to keeping your visitors engaged. The main goal is to keep your visitors on your site long enough to take the desired action that you want — either contacting you, signing up for a newsletter, requesting a quote, or purchasing a product or service.

If you’re interested in learning more about boosting your website’s user engagement, contact us today!