Did you know that a whopping 55% of your site visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your webpages?
That means a lot of what people click on, they don’t read.
No matter how great the content is on your website, if people aren’t engaging with it, you’re not likely to see positive results.
In fact, if the time people spend on your website hovers around the 15-second mark, you can expect to see high bounce rates, low conversions rates, and very little profit.
Luckily, there are many ways to increase engagement on your website and boost the amount of time people spend on each one of your site’s webpages.
So, let’s take a look at some of some of the most common and effective ways of boosting site engagement.
1. Monitor Site Speed
One of the most frustrating things for people that arrive on websites is slow page loading times.
After all, no one likes to wait.
In fact, if your site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, nearly 40% of people will abandon your website without checking out what you have to offer.
That’s a lot of missed opportunities.
One of the best ways to avoid slow loading times and a poor user experience is to routinely monitor the speed and performance of your website.
You can do this using the free online tool Google PageSpeed Insights.
With this tool, you get the loading speeds of both your desktop and mobile versions.
Plus, Google gives you a speed score and suggestions for increasing your loading times, such as:
- Enabling browser caching
- Compressing images into smaller files
- Utilizing a CDN
- Minifying CSS, HTML, and JS files
- And more
The faster your pages load when site visitors arrive, the longer they’re likely to stick around and explore your website. The first and probably the most important step towards a fast loading website is choosing a good web hosting right from the get-go.
2. Be Mobile-Friendly
48.2% of all global internet traffic can be attributed to mobile traffic.
As a website owner looking to drive traffic, boost site engagement, and increase conversions, you must understand the importance of having a mobile-friendly website.
There’s a neat tool call Responsive Checker that will help you determine not only whether your website is mobile-friendly, but user-friendly too.
After inputting your website’s URL, you’ll see how your site appears on different mobile devices, such as a smartphone, laptop, and tablet.
And to top it off, you can interact with the results and see exactly what your site visitors see as they navigate your website.
Ease of navigation is the key to getting mobile device site visitors to stay on your website longer.
After all, the less they have to scroll, zoom, or invert their device to read your site’s content, the more content they’ll read.
3. Discover What People Are Searching For
If you’re in the process of scaling your home based business, it’s important to find out what your customers are looking for, both on your website and in organic searches, so you sell the right products or services.
There are many people out there working from home and trying to generate revenue in the following ways:
- Blogging: pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing, selling products and services, sponsored posts
- YouTube: becoming a YouTube partner, ad campaigns, affiliate marketing, brand sponsorships, and merchandise deals
- Podcasting: sponsorships and ads, selling products and services, crowdfunding, repurposing video content into eBooks, subscriptions and memberships
As you can see, there are many ways to make money from home. And they often involve site visitors from external channels coming to your site and helping you generate that money.
But the key to a successful at home business is knowing what the people want, and then giving it to them.
The first way you can check what people want is to connect your website to an online metrics tool like Google Analytics, set up a search bar on your website, and then monitor what people are searching for once on your site.
One reason people leave your site is because they think you’ll have what they’re looking for, only to find out that you don’t.
If you can see the type of terms people are searching for in your eCommerce shop, you can begin to offer everyday items that are searched for that you don’t currently provide.
Second, you can monitor what people are searching for in Google itself to see what your target audience as a whole is looking for.
By knowing what the general population is actively searching for, and then offering it to them, you’ll not only drive more traffic your way but also boost the length of time people spend on your site.
After all, if you have what people want, they’ll stick around to read it, watch it, it buy it.
4. Make Things Visual
People are visual by nature. And besides possibly a highly compelling headline on your website, images are the first thing people are going to notice once on your site.
If you can grab someone’s attention with visually appealing imagery, on your site’s homepage, product pages, and even within blog content, people will become more interested and engaged.
All of this means longer sessions on your website.
The problem with adding visual imagery to your website is that there are so many of the same stock images floating around it can be tough to set your site apart from the competition.
And while people are naturally drawn to images, if your images are boring, irrelevant, or the same old thing everyone else has on their site, you aren’t going to benefit.
To create one-of-a-kind images to add to your site, use a tool like Canva.
It comes with tons of pre-design templates for:
- Advertisements
- Social media
- Banner ads
- Blog content
- Infographics
- Lead magnets
- And more
Just pick a template to suit your needs and customize the font, layouts, icons, color schemes, and more.
And if you want, you can even upload some of your images into your Canva creation to make things more brand-related.
This is especially helpful if you want to get into email marketing, which is a great way to drive people to your site so they can spend time there seeing what you have for them.
Just remember, being visually appealing in all aspects of site promotion, even email marketing, is critical to grabbing people’s attention.
For instance, look into creating an email signature that further entices people to click and take action.
Grabbing people’s attention is half the battle when it comes to boosting site engagement and convincing people to stay on your site longer.
Use a powerful image to grab that attention, and your killer content and products are services to get people to stay.
Final Thoughts
Increasing the time people spend on your website is going to be a continual effort. This is especially true as your online business begins to grow and more site visitors come your way.
And, while there is a lot of competition out there trying to pull your site visitors away from your site with better content, better, deals, and faster loading webpages, you can fight back.
Work hard to optimize your site for speed and performance, make sure to give people on all devices a good user experience, and always try to appeal to more than one sense.
That’s the key to boosting site engagement and growing a successful business that others in your industry have to worry about.
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