Posted by Make Surfing Your Website Easy
Keeping visitors engaged on a website will increase the chances of transforming them into new customers and greatly improve the likelihood that they will keep returning. It’s not rocket science, but it does require a bit of originality to make sure you are making yourself stand out from the crowd. You can’t stop visitors from leaving your website but you can encourage them to stay longer by incorporating some of the following suggestions.
Once you employ useful, and applicable creativity into your website your online users will appreciate the usability you integrate into the design of your website. To start, designing a clear, easy, attractive navigation, an intuitive user experience, and the overall way in which your website navigation is structured can influence the length of time your visitors stay on your website. This can do a lot to keep first first-time visitors lingering and turning them into repeat visitors.
Suggesting related content and highlighting related posts for visitors to continue reading an interesting post is another way to pre-occupy your visitors. Chances are, if they’re visiting your site it’s because they believe your content has what they’re looking for. By giving them options to check out other posts with similar content in this way might get them to click on an internal link. And if you’re able to get them to do this, well, that’s more time spent on your website.
Also, when visitors read through the contents of your web pages, they’ll most likely pause to look at the pictures alongside the text. In addition, having clickable pictures, which should lead to more of your website’s content, can possibly keep them hanging around longer as well. When you include images you not only improve the aesthetics of your website, but they can also help convey a message that is presented alongside the text and encourage visitors to stay longer.
Build A User-Friendly Website
Provide an interesting and easy website for your visitors with content that interests them by way of a responsive web design. A section dedicated to popular trends gives users the feeling of being included, and if they like the content, they will feel part of your community.
Video is sometimes easier to relate to than text, so providing an option for your visitor to watch a video to become informed, rather than reading the same information could be a valuable feature. If providing simple options will optimize your site visitors’ experience while lengthening their visiting time, and it makes sense for your website, go for it.
Explanatory videos are great for getting your visitor’s attention, and the description of products and services in infographics can take longer to review than text-based posts. The video should end up on a page with a single, specific target, and the use of visual elements can help keep visitors there until they reach the conversion target.
Keep Them Interested
Adding a search bar to your site improves the user’s online engagement, experience, and the duration of sessions that visitors spend on your site.
The fonts you use can improve the legibility of your content. As a rule of thumb, the specific purpose of your website and the needs of your audience require a lot of words, and the ease at which they can read your website’s content can go a long way.
Also, creating a sense of urgency by providing a call to action (CTA) statements by asking your site visitors to “sign up,” “buy now,” “click here,” or encourage them to engage with your content by ending your posts with questions that can be answered by them in the comment section. If a visitor makes it to the end of a post and you end it with a question, it increases the likelihood that those readers will leave a comment compared to if you did not ask a question.
Inserting links to various categories in visible places, such as the top menu or the sidebar, helps visitors to easily navigate through your pages and find the content they want to read. If a visitor stumbles across a link, word, or phrase while reading an article they can click on the link to learn more about that topic. And they can use the main navigation menu of your websites to find other pages by using context-sensitive or internal links to guide them through your website.
You can also present special offers or discount codes to try and keep your visitors in their shopping carts. Or, you can redirect them to a relevant page on your site if they try to leave their shopping cart without having made a purchase.
Offer Valuable Features And Experiences
According to Orro, giving your online visitor an option to engage with your website through a private cloud allows them to operate over a private network, and where they can engage with their colleagues. Having this feature as an added benefit gives them all of the advantages of privacy, self-service, control, and customization.
Whether you offer them simple cloud-based or more advanced applications, the accessibility to this feature is often engaging enough to keep them reading more about it and hanging around your website for much longer.
Provide Peace Of Mind
With added cybersecurity measures you can protect the integrity of your website and your customer’s information from online attacks. By advertising the preventive measures your website is taking you’re demonstrating your site’s dedication to protecting your online visitor’s privacy and information.
This not only adds to the professionalism but the legitimacy of your website. In this day and age, taking the time to assure your visitors that your site is secure is a very powerful statement and it just might make them want to stick around a little bit longer.
Your Sites’ Opportunities Are Endless in Keeping Your Visitors Engaged And Present
As you can see there are a plethora of ways to employ to keep visitors on your website longer. If you have a high bounce rate, collecting data from analytics will tell you how long visitors stay on a page of your website and that can give you valuable information about the interest they have in the content on that page. A solution could be as simple as switching content and images around.
Measuring page views calls to action clicks, and form submissions helps show how well your website performs. And once you realize what is causing your visitors to leave your site, make a serious plan to make them stay longer. If you continue to use different strategies and methods you should be able to eventually track and analyze the problem so you can make the necessary website updates and changes.
Final Thoughts
Your website content, images, colours and design formats all come together to provide a positive experience for users, which can turn them into conversions. Constant practice and improvements based on customer preferences will help users stay on your site for as long as possible. Therefore, imploring these methods by creating a website with interesting, understandable, and readable content will keep users engaged longer and potentially turn them into repeat customers.
About the Author
Monica is a passionate writer and content creator. Her interests include outdoor activities, fitness, technology, entrepreneurship and everything in between. Say hi to Monica on Twitter @monical_lee.