Website engagement or user engagement is a vital area of your online marketing efforts. As long as your content is relevant, then your website should attract visitors looking for information or an answer which your content holds the key to. Not only should your content contain the right answers, it also needs to be visually pleasing and well-presented. The start of the user journey is the ‘traffic source’ which leads them to your website, and from here it is down to your content to ‘wow’ the site visitors into staying on your site and connecting with your brand.
Below we look at key points you can use to increase user engagement on your website!
Adding Website Features to Help User Navigation
Integrating features into your web design often helps to encourage site visitors to explore more pages on your site. With all user engagement strategies, the idea is to generate more page views, longer session times, and reduce bounce rates, and aesthetic web design plays a major role in improving user perception. You need to use high-quality images, accurate content, and avoiding exaggerating and annoying users with flimsy/weak or off-topic information.
Here are some tips to follow up on:
- Add a blog with industry relevant and useful content!
- Add an interactive chat box to see what site visitors are saying!
- Add internal links to relevant topics to the page the user is visiting!
- Add categories to help users sort pages by topics!
- Add tags, which is a more specific version of categories!
- Add infographics and videos!
The results will speak for themselves if you can figure out how to make your web design more attractive, interactive, and user-friendly!
Using the right lead generation strategy
Straight off the bat we would like to clear up one point of confusion. ‘SEO’, ‘paid advertising’, ‘social media’, and other ‘traffic sources’ come from lead generation which is website user engagement. When we pit ‘Lead Gen’ Vs ‘User Engagement’ against each other, you will discover that they are two separate strategies within your overall integrated online marketing plan.
Or put another way, 99% of webmasters do not create content according to the source of the online leads, and rather it is the other way around. ‘Lead gen’ tactics focus on using relevant copy to attract the ‘right kind of visitors’ looking for the specific content on your website.
For example, if your website sells ‘football equipment’ but your Google Ads are targeting the keyword ‘sports equipment’, then your user engagement stats could suffer because the keyword is not specific enough to football.
Just be clear on another point, social media shares, likes, and so on have no impact on user engagement on your website per se. The idea of social media is ‘lead gen’ while it also helps with your brand reputation and customer engagement. Moreover, it is a noble example of a lead gen tool that can be used to bring relevant traffic to your website.
Going back to the above example, pictures of football equipment for sale on your social media show people exactly what your website is selling and will attract visitors looking specifically for this product, and as a result enhances user engagement as long as your content is well presented.
Using Web Analytic Tools
To increase user engagement, webmasters are using analytics software. One prominent example of analytics software is Google Analytics, which is a free tool and is perhaps the most popular today! Using an analytics platform helps to give you an idea of how many views your website has received in a given time, which location those views came from, and the device/OS/web browser used to access your site thus giving you a useful audience overview!
This type of user engagement is mostly a measure of how much visitors absorb browsing your website, while user engagement strategies are ultimately a tactic employed to influence how long users stay on your site and whether they end up buying your products or clicking certain links or ads. Next, measuring the return on engagement activity is another challenge you will face.
All in all, you have little control, although you do have some, over who and when users visit your website and their eventual onsite user behaviour, but you can try to create funnels, track the results and create content that increases user engagement. Meanwhile, there are also technical factors which give you clues as to why a particular page or area of your website attracts high user engagement such as page speeds or mobile responsiveness on tablets or smartphones.
How Do the Above Points Help Increase User Engagement?
All the above points tie in with one another to increase user engagement. Firstly, a well-designed mobile responsive website ensures visitors do not bounce. Next, understanding analytics tools helps you gauge user behaviour and adjust content accordingly. Content adjustments require plenty of test runs (tinkering), such as adding features to your site and monitoring the effect of doing so on user engagement. And of course, your lead gen needs to point the right kind of people to your content, or you could end up changing perfectly good content showing high bounce rates, while the problem is in fact the lead gen pulling in the wrong target market – a costly mistake you will 100% want to avoid!