Keeping your readers engaged and active on your website (be it a community, presentation website or blog) is a must. And a good way to measure this engagement is using the TIME factor. Knowing how much time your readers spend on each page is paramount to developing new articles and even determining the need of a redesign and optimization.
Bounce rate has been a key factor in Google rankings for some time now, and it’s very clear why: if the visitors don’t like what they see, they will surely let you know by leaving the page, or the website all together. They will not convert into paying customers, readers, subscribers or anything else. And retargeting them will be useless, since they haven’t found what they were looking or to begin with.
So I’ve compiled a list of 5 factors that will keep your visitors longer on your website:
- Design – readability – mobile – keep your website design as clean as possible, make the content easy to read and understand, and always optimize for mobile. Since most of the readers today use their smartphones to share and read links, it’s only natural to provide optimized content for them.
- Content upgrades – make your readers work for that special content you’ve written. Have them subscribe to your newsletter in order to read more of your articles and even create an account on your platform.
- Internal and external links – links have always been a valuable tool in keeping your audience engaged. If you have a blog, consider inter-linking articles with the same subject. And if you have to offer external links – always make them open in a new tab.
- Credibility markers – I’ve been meaning to write a longer article about this, but never got around to actually doing it. So this is a good moment to talk a bit more about what are credibility markers and how you can improve your website with them. These indicators provide trust in your brand/website/product and sometimes offer a quick glimpse into your client pool. Credibility markers can come in many shapes, but the most used are trust seals (certifications of your website trustworthiness) and testimonials (messages from people who have used your product or services and stand by it). They show your claims are real and that new readers should stick around.
- CTAs – Call to cation buttons and links have always been one of the darlings of web designers. A CTA is very easy to set up and immediately engages the readers. You can use them in big banners (such as the ones for newsletter subscribers), links in text and even normal text that prompts action (such as a question at the end of an article).
Hope this list helps you and makes your website visitors stay longer. Do you have anything to add to it? Maybe something I left out? I would love to hear about it in the comment section.
Photo by Webaroo.com.au on Unsplash
