User Engagement: When you run a business website, it is not just important that you manage to get people onto the site in the first place – you also need to ensure that they are fully engaged with what you have put out there. After all, it is not going to do your company much good at all if they simply visit your site and click off again within a matter of seconds. So, user engagement is highly important to measure and increase wherever possible. How do you go about achieving this particular goal? Well, here are a few actionable ideas that you can put into practice.
Keep Load Time Down to Increase User Engagement
We live in a world in which consumers are less patient than they ever were before. Slow loading times can instantly mean that your users do not even make it onto your site in the first place – or stay there a short time as the page that they wanted will simply not load. In fact, it can be a matter of seconds that can really negatively impact your site. Therefore, you need to remove anything unnecessary from your site that is causing a holdup. There are various testing tools out there that can help you to determine if your site is loading quick enough and where the problem lies if not.
Simplify Navigation
Many visitors leave a website as they are simply unable to find what they are looking for. This also closely links to the impatience factor that we discussed in the section just above this one. If your navigation structure has started to become a little convoluted, now is the time to get it into a state of the organization. Make sure that everything is categorized well with clear headings and subheadings. You can also help users to find things by displaying related content to them. Of course, you do not want your navigation to slow down your load time in any way.
Use Proactive Chat
Proactive chat is another great way to engage visitors. Essentially, this means checking if users need assistance before they have even asked you for support. If they do not need the support, they can simply ignore the message, but if they do require it, this can help to pre-empt any questions that they were having. As a result, they are more likely to buy your products or use your services. Having a general live chat function can also be useful, and many organizations are utilizing chatbots as a way of answering queries without needing to have a customer support agent at the other end.
Choose a Responsive Design
More and more people are using their phones as their primary way of accessing the internet, which means that building responsive sites has become more important than ever. If your site functions well on a laptop but simply does not work on a small mobile screen, this is inevitably going to cause an issue. People do not want to have to go through the ‘pinch and zoom’ effort of increasing a web page to view it on a phone. Sites tend to be quite simple when they are reduced to mobile size, and it makes sense that you do not overdo the complexity level here.
Continue Adding Fresh Content
When people have visited a website once, they need to have reasons to keep coming back time after time. The most popular way of doing this is by continually adding fresh content. Whenever you add something new, you should not simply keep it to yourself. Instead, it needs to be shouted about all over your social media pages and beyond.
Ideally, you should have a clear content plan in place. This way, you do not have to keep thinking about what you are going to add to your site, which makes it more likely that you are going to forget and not add anything at all. Instead, your content should be planned based on current trends, as well as what your users are interested in reading about. The more customer research you do, the more likely it is that you are going to be able to work out what engages your readership the most.
Enhance Your Internal Linking Structure
A better internal linking structure has a couple of major benefits. First of all, it can provide a boost to your overall SEO ranking. Not only this, but it also helps with the navigation on your site. The links that you choose should be descriptive in the anchor text. Obviously, they also need to go somewhere new!
This way, you can get people moving around the site in a way that works well. If there is another piece of content that you think people would like to read, you can put this in a ‘see also’ section at the bottom of the page. Remember, once you have established an internal linking structure, it is important that you make a special effort to keep all of them working well. Otherwise, this could have a detrimental effect on your search engine optimization, which is obviously the opposite effect to the one that you were intending.
Use Different Forms of Media
While the written content on your website is highly important, you also need to think about other ways that you can engage your audience. Images and infographics are a great way of conveying a large amount of information in a short space. Also, you should think about adding a short video or two onto the various pages of your site.
Analyze Your Success
It makes sense that when you have a website with metrics that are so measurable that you should analyze key statistics such as your bounce rate that the pages and pieces of content that are attracting the most clicks. This way, you can keep on producing the type of content that people are really interested in and reduce what is not getting such great results all of the time.
