Top tips for boosting user engagement on your website
- Develop exciting interactive content
- Maximise social media
- Make your website easy to navigate
A successful website depends on a high level of user engagement. Website engagement plays a crucial role in helping your business to succeed. But what does user engagement mean exactly? User engagement is the length of time a visitor stays on your website to read your content or interact with key features such as adverts, videos and pop-ups. Website engagement is needed to generate new leads, make sales, retain customers and create new ones.
What are our top 11 tips?
We have comprised a list of 10 top tips to guide you on your journey towards keeping visitors engaged in your website. Above all, think about making your website attractive, interactive and user-friendly. In turn, the longer visitors decide to stick around and engage the better your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will be and the higher your business will appear in the google search rankings.
1. Keep an eye on your bounce rate
Don’t forget to analyse your bounce rate when assessing how successful your user engagement levels are. The bounce rate measures the percentage of users that clicked on a page of your website but left without visiting anywhere else. The lower your bounce rate the better.
2. Develop interactive content
Bringing your website to life with interactive content boosts engagement. As well as providing a strong Mission Statement on your homepage, think about the visuals you can include and ways to encourage visitors to take part in interactive quizzes and assessments, surveys and polls. Other visuals include pop-up ads that require a user’s attention as it is a small window that appears while browsing a website. Marketers use pop-ups for advertising their business and services and generating leads.
Make use of interactive videos such as youtube posts about your products and services, tailor-made to your audience. Visuals communicate ideas that you can’t express in words. Other interactive content includes blogging, testimonials, and video enhanced case studies.
3. What’s popular and what’s not?
Use tools such as Survey Monkey to find out what users of your website are looking for in terms of content or design and respond accordingly.
4. Become more social!
It is imperative to link your website to your content on popular social media channels such as your Facebook page, your Linkedin page, Twitter and Instagram to increase user engagement. Visitors should be able to read your latest tweets and react by either retweeting what you have shared or by sending direct messages to your business.
An example of how you can boost engagement in your website is with Facebook-embedded posts. Since 2013, Facebook has made it possible to embed personal profile or page posts onto an external website. These embedded posts help encourage users to interact with your statuses away from the official Facebook site – boosting your website engagement. Take note – as long as the status update is made public it can be embedded.
5. Choose your writing style
Choose a friendly conversational tone or formal professional tone for your business. Your writing style encourages user-engagement and is important to your brand identity.
6. Add a prominent search box to your website
Don’t make users search for the search box! Add a prominent search box where website visitors can easily locate specific content and engage. Search boxes are usually positioned on the top left-hand side of a website. Think about adding features such as a drop-down menu from the search bar to increase traffic and user engagement.
7. Make your website accessible
Make sure you put in the effort to design a mobile friendly version of your site. This allows users to absorb your content and interact with your website when on the go. It is important to make your website accessible to both desktop and mobile phone users. Another tip to consider is introducing and installing an app that links directly to the website which is fully compatible with mobile phone usage.
8. Don’t leave in a hurry!
Don’t make your website visitors wait or leave in a hurry – reduce your page loading time. Slow loading pages put people off. By using tools like Pingdom you can test whether your page loads within two seconds. Although images can be engaging, reduce the number you upload to increase the speed of the page loading time. Another handy hint is to download plug-ins to ensure the image loading is delayed until readers scroll to a specific area of the site.
9. Get linked in
A good linking structure to your website boosts your SEO ranking and helps users navigate the website easily. Make the links descriptive. Internal links direct a website user from one part of your website to another. It signposts visitors to other content and reduces your bounce rate. Essentially a strong linking strategy increases web engagement because it helps your website’s SEO, it makes it easier to navigate your website and means visitors will stay on your webpage for longer.
10. Collect email addresses
Collect email addresses to keep users engaged with your content and to provide content up-dates. An example of this would be to include a pop-up opt in form where web users can type their email addresses. Another option is to place a subscription form on your sidebar.
11. Contests and giveaways
Holding contests or giveaways can generate page visits, subscriptions, conversions and website user engagement. Users could be rewarded for content shares, referrals, social media likes or testimonials. This is turn will boost your place in the google rankings.
Creating good website engagement helps sell your products and services, maintain good customer relations and win over new clients. Take action by following our top ten tips above and help your business to evolve with the times.