Let’s talk about how you can boost Visitor Engagement in Digital Marketing for your website. But, first off, what is visitor engagement, and why do you need it? Well, if you are trying to increase traffic to your website, you should know that the journey doesn’t stop with just traffic alone. Of course getting new and more visitors to your website is one thing but what’s equally important is how you can keep them on your website as long as you can.
Let me explain how you can boost visitor engagement by working with essential metrics that SEO professionals and search engines look for in websites as a measure of their relevancy. We need to talk about Average Time on Page and Average Session Duration. You can see these metrics on Google Analytics under the behavior tab. Both of these can tell you how relevant users find your website. The more time they spend on your website, the better it is. Of course, there’s an argument that the longer they spend on your website could also mean that the information they’re looking for is not easily found. But we’ll keep that for another day.
Ideally, if you can keep organic search users interested long enough to stay on your website and interacting with it, you should see success. The question now is what are the ways by which you can increase engagement on your website?
Start Internal Linking for Visitor Engagement in Digital Marketing Discovery
The first tip is to have a strong internal linking game. As you publish new articles, make sure that you keep linking to them from previous posts using relevant anchor texts. Not only does it provides SEO value to your articles, but it also increases the chances of users clicking on links that lead to reading more articles. This thereby increases the average session duration. Don’t overdo it though. One internal link to every other paragraph is good enough. I use this technique on my blogs and as well as on some of my client’s website, and I have seen positive results all the time.
Build New and Relevant Content
Number two is to provide relevant content based on the landing page article. For example, let’s say someone visited your website searching for “best headphones” your landing page needs to have great content listing out the best headphones and reviews for them. It might be worth saying that within two minutes of reading and as soon as the user is close to finishing the article, it might be a good idea to show or suggest relevant articles like “best over-the-ear headphones” and “best budget headphones” too. Based on the search intent of the user, he or she might choose to read one of the suggested articles and that will help you increase the average time spent on your website.
If you’re on a content management system like WordPress, there are several creative ways to get this done. You could use a plugin that automatically shows relevant articles based on the tags and categories for suggested reading. Showing relevant articles for further reading is an excellent way to increase engagement on websites.
Create Scroll Friendly Content
My content strategy would be incomplete if I did not tell you how to create scroll friendly content. So what really is scroll friendly content? You should know that more than 90% of visitors on your website is checking out or reading your content on their mobile devices. This means two things for boosting visitor engagement in digital marketing:
- One, they don’t have much time and they are impatiently waiting for your website to impress them by giving them the information they were looking for in the first place. If it doesn’t, they are going to jump to the next result.
- Two, they aren’t really reading word by word. Users are scrolling and with each swipe, they are exposed to a lot of information on the internet. We’ve all become experts at scrolling and skimming through stuff, absorbing bits and pieces of content that we really need or like.
If you wrote that 5000 words article but 90% of your website visitors aren’t really reading all of it, it means they’re skimming and scrolling. Make sure that your content is skim and scroll worthy. You could also pair this with Visual Storytelling to see better results.
Make sure that there are visual breaks in your content like a blank space or visual imagery. Every other scroll should have huge chunks of paragraphs broken down visually. Make sure that you write short and crisp sentences that give away the crux of whatever you’re trying to explain. Use formats like bullet points, infographics quotes etc to make your content less boring and add subheadings that saves time and helps understand the topic. While skimming through it make your content bite-sized, simple and in easy to understand formats.
Use Call to Actions for Visitor Engagement in Digital Marketing
Tip number four is to use a creative Call to Actions. Call to Actions or CTAs are marketing terms for any device designed to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale. A prominent contextually placed signup form or well-placed button or even a strategically placed comment section can be all great CTAs. Anything tastefully designed to generate a response from your reader or user is a call to action. Call to Actions are great ways to boost engagement on your website. Make sure that you place them strategically at places within the website so that it generates an action from your users. Just a word of caution, don’t go overboard with too many CTAs. You can also check out some great Lead Generation Tools to continue working on your content ranking strategy.
Multiple CTAs are distasteful and annoy users. I’ve seen sites that have multiple CTAs that pop up one after another. It’s almost like you have to dodge these things to actually read the content on the website. Don’t make it a painful experience for the excuse of increasing engagement.
Unintentional design happens when the organization focuses on the business or the technology but doesn’t focus on the customer or user experience. The result is an experience that emerges that often isn’t pleasant.
Jared M. Spool | Share
Keep Load Times Minimum
The next tip is probably the toughest one on this list and it’s all about page load times. Keep the average load time on your website for each page under two seconds if possible, one second. Of course, you knew this already, but do this by going to Google Analytics and check your page load time for all the top pages on your website. You will notice that the pages with the least traffic usually have a higher page load time. This could happen because of many factors. Maybe there’s a heavy image on the page or something’s broken or perhaps of javascript that is taking minutes to load. Whatever it is, go fix it. Nobody likes slow loading websites, It’s like punishment for your website’s visitors.
Keep page load times as low as one to two seconds if possible. You will notice that your engagement and average time spent on the website will improve. There’s a great plugin called Smush that can help deal with reducing page load times.
Make sure that you track performance and monitor data for effective visitor engagement in digital marketing. If you want to improve engagement on your website, keep tracking the following data before and after you make changes on your website. Average time on page, average session duration, and bounce rates. Keep tabs on the aggregate value for the entire website as well as individual pages having baseline metrics to compare. This will always tell you whether you’re progressing or not. Many marketers forget it and make silly mistakes often. Don’t be that guy.