When it comes to running an online business, arguably the most important metric any marketer will immediately take note of is user engagement. It is measured in several different ways depending on who your analytics provider is.
In its simplest form, user engagement is your visitors sticking around to not just enjoy your content but to explore and possibly even leave feedback. The most common types of user engagement are commenting, discussions, sharing the content to social media and, of course, watching videos.
Here are the five best ways to get visitors to stick around on your site a bit more.
1. Video
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that video has been turning heads in all manner of ways. According to a RenderForest survey, for example, using video on a page has been shown to push user engagement up by at least 22%.
This has been driven in part by the popularity of private video hosts. While having videos on your site has been shown over and over to be beneficial, getting them there is often quite a hassle. From eating up all your bandwidth to the unavailability of pretty open source solutions that can be modified easily, hosting your own videos is chock full of reasons to not do it. Private video hosts have put it at the fingertips of anyone willing to reap the benefits.
2. Live chat box
A live chat box is an incredibly cost-effective method to increase user engagement on any website. Its main benefit is that it enables dishing out of a personalized service that effectively prevents a visitor from simply exiting your site when they find something confusing or have questions they need to ask.
According to Econsultancy, live chat ranks highest when it comes to preferred methods of customers reaching out, standing at a 73% user satisfaction as compared to 61% for emails and 44% for phone calls. In fact, a properly implemented live chat allows the customer to leave feedback with a few clicks of the mouse and that’s done. This kind of data is immeasurably valuable for future reference and use.
Additionally, some embeddable live chat applications also double up as anonymous tracking scripts. They can follow the user around as soon as he lands on the first page until they abandon it. This can help you identify points that can be improved for better conversion and engagement rates.
3. Highly optimized linking structure
Internal links, links that allow a user to move on to another page within the same domain, are some of the most overlooked pieces of the complex SEO framework. External links have been well-documented and their benefits are well understood, in large part due to the kinds of emphasis search engines have historically set on them.
Despite having tweaked their algorithm to include more important details and avoiding dark SEO practices, the importance of internal and external linking has never really gone anywhere. Having a highly optimized linking structure is as important as ever.
With regards to internal linking, some important points to remember are:
- Link high authority pages on your site to each other. Google takes into account a lot more than just who links to you – which of your pages you encourage them to visit also matters a lot.
- Search engines aside, it’s also in your best interest to direct visitors to sites that have had historically high conversion rates. These are already popular for a reason, and being able to replicate the formula on other pages will help you a lot.
However, we mustn’t forget the value of other sites linking to yours. These follow a similar formula, the more trustworthy and popular, the move value they pass on to you.
Lastly, make sure none of your links are dead. If Google’s crawling bot (spider) encounter 404’s at any point, your ranking will take a huge hit.
4. Content
The amount of content on your page will ultimately make or break your site, regardless of what manner of SEO you use to attract the visitors. Having unique monthly visitors is one thing, but having quality content to make them stay is a whole other thing. You also need to find the perfect sweet spot – it should neither be too long nor too short.
Most blog posts will do incredibly well with between 1,000 and 2,500 words. Here, the amount of user engagement should be optimal, as long as you have the content to boot. While having more words may seem like an easy strategy to keep them more hooked since they’ll spend more time reading by default, it’s not that easy.
Humans get bored pretty easily. Expanding your text with fluff will chase off all those prospective customers away.
5. Easy navigation
Every website on the internet has some form of navigation to help people get around. However, a sizable chunk of these are made by designers who are more focused on making everything look pretty rather than incorporating marketing statistics and metrics into them.
For small businesses where the programmers also function as the designers and big businesses alike, there are a few crucial factors to remember:
- Consistency: The navigation around your site should be as consistent as possible, such that it’s easy to navigate and increases the visibility of things that the customer wants to find quickly. A constantly-changing navigation system will invariably confuse users, especially those that rely on bookmarks which require thins to remain pretty much the same. If you really have to move things around, make sure you execute redirects properly.
- Clarity: If your website is very heavy on content, it’s going to be necessary to divide your content into multiple categories and subcategories that take care of everything the user might need. Excellent examples of sites that do this particularly well are eBay, Amazon and most other big e-commerce sites.
- Lastly, make sure it scales down well to smaller screens, but more on that in a bit.
6. Your site should be mobile friendly
Responsiveness is one of those things that simply can’t be stressed enough. 48.2% of the world accesses the internet through a mobile phone – not including relatively larger devices like the iPad or Galaxy Tab.
Being mobile friendly is a prerequisite of surviving online today. Mobile friendliness helps to capture the crucial market that either prefers to tour the internet on mobile or has no other way to access the internet. In which case, all the crucial information should be presented first so the user doesn’t have to look too far to find what they want. The latter point creates the need for a responsive navigation menu.
7. Site speed
The final piece of the puzzle that is getting users more interested in what you have to offer is increasing the loading speed of every page on your site.
This will mostly be up to the developer, but primarily involves things like minifying the CSS/HTML/JS on your site, enabling GZIP compression, utilizing caching of static content like images and, once the server has had enough, improving backend architecture by moving on to a faster server/host to improve response time.