A good website is an important aspect of any successful business. Your website is like a virtual storefront and is often the first thing potential customers will see. User engagement is a good indicator of how likely potential customers are to make a purchase.
Website design is an essential part of ensuring your website is up to scratch. Content should be targeted, relevant and engaging. Your website should be optimized to create the best possible experience for a user. To improve user engagement, you need to focus on improving a few aspects of your website that we will focus on below.
What is User Engagement?
User engagement is the best way to measure whether users find value in a product or service. Engagement can be measured by many different actions that a user takes when viewing your content. For websites, user engagement is typically measured by daily usage, downloads, clicks, shares, time on a page, searches and comments.
Reduce Website’s Page Load Time
We have all been on a website that takes ages to load. As a potential customer, this creates a frustrating experience and distracts from the product. As a business, you should ensure that your website is loading quickly.
Why does a website’s page load time matter? Well, page speeds can actually affect Google rankings. According to Portent, “the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates”. This means that potential customers may be less likely to find your business. To prevent this, you should conduct a page test.
Mobile-Friendly Navigation
Mobile load speeds are just as important as a desktop website. Most people use their mobile phones to search for a product or service with 54.1% of all online traffic coming from mobile phones. A poor website will harm your brand even if your desktop website is up to scratch.
A mobile responsive design provides users with a seamless experience. You can even use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your website is mobile-friendly.
Internal Linking
Using internal links is a great tactic for boosting SEO! Internal linking is when you link from one page on your website to another. This helps users navigate your website.
External links help build website credibility but internal links not only build credibility but also help keep users on your website for longer. The reason this is important for SEO is that the more times your website is linked, the higher it appears in search engine rankings. This signals to Google that your website has important and useful information that is worth sharing.
Internal links further help to establish a hierarchy of information. For example, you can create a topic cluster. Topic clusters guide users from a pillar page with broad information to more specific cluster pages.
Page Layout
Content should be a big part of your team’s marketing strategy. Content provides context to your business. If you provide value and use the correct layout, you can attract new visitors and convert them into leads.
Your websites page layout can draw potential customers in and retain old customers. Long-form content is the most effective. According to HubSpot, “articles with a word count between 2,250-2,500 earn the most organic traffic”.
If you combine different layout tips such as a clear title and section headers, your content is easier to read. It can be overwhelming for users to look at huge blocks of content. Try to break up your content into short paragraphs to include lots of white space. This makes your website more aesthetically pleasing.
Chat Box
Including a chat box seems like an obvious solution to increasing website engagement. However, so many websites fail to make a live chat option available. Live chat has the highest consumer satisfaction rate at 92%.
A live chat is an accessible way for potential customers to speak with your customer service team. There are plenty of benefits to adding a chat box to your website such as improved user experience and 24/7 support. A chat box is an opportunity to add a human feel to your website. You can also include a picture and a name that may make users more comfortable to open a live chat.
Audience Research
Any business needs to understand their audience’s needs. Studying your buyer persona will help you do this. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representative of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculations about demographics, motivations and goals.
What will make your buyer persona move from a prospective customer to a customer? What actions do you need to take to achieve this? Researching your audience allows you to produce informed and targeted marketing strategy.
Our Conclusion
It is important to have a clear, relevant and targeted marketing strategy that appeals to your ideal customers. You should focus on several key areas mentioned in this article to engage users on your website. Reduce your websites page load time, ensure your website is mobile friendly, include a live chat option, use a clear page layout as well as internal linking and do your research. These tips, if used correctly, will increase website engagement.
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