For most businesses, the website is the key source of inbound leads. When visitors spend time on your website, they are more educated, more engaged and more likely to make a purchase. As an added bonus, Google rewards sites that keep visitors online with higher SEO rankings. One metric to look at in determining visitor engagement is your website’s bounce rate, or the number of people who leave your site after visiting only one page. To determine your bounce rate, check out your Google Analytics dashboard. If your visitors are leaving after less than one minute, or your bounce rate is higher than 50 percent, you need to increase the time visitors are spending on your site.
Here are five tips for keeping visitors on your website longer:
- Make content “scannable.” Most visitors read only 28 percent of the words on a web page. Therefore, it’s important to design pages so they are easy to read. Use attention-grabbing headlines and subheads to move readers through your content. Keep paragraphs short and include bulleted lists to break up large blocks of text. Bold or italicize key words and phrases.
- Add images and multimedia. Although content is king when it comes to marketing, visual content is essential to website engagement. In a world of shortened attention spans, compelling images, video and infographics can enhance content, increase engagement and boost brand reputation and awareness.
- Communicate your value proposition. One reason visitors may bounce off your site is that they feel that it doesn’t provide value or that it isn’t the right place for them to be. To prevent this, be sure to feature a clear value proposition on your homepage. When first-time visitors arrive, they should know exactly who you are, what you do and how you can help them.
- Use internal links. One way to keep visitors moving through your site is to link them to related pages via internal links. This can be done on key website pages and blog posts and helps drive visitors to important areas on your site. When using internal links, be sure to make them easy to find with the standard blue color and use keywords to provide SEO value.
- Add new content regularly. If your blog isn’t updated regularly or if other information is outdated, visitors have no reason to return to your website frequently. Keep blogs frequent and regular, highlight industry trends and current events, and provide useful information that will keep visitors coming back for more.
The more engaging your website is, the longer visitors will stay. When visitors spend more time on your site, you’ll gain an increase in high-quality leads that can lead to real results. To learn more about how you increase visitor engagement through quality content marketing, contact Trade Press Services today.