Top Tips to Keep Your Website Visitors Engaged

You rank well on Google and attract lots of visitors to your site but why aren’t you seeing any increase in enquiries or sales?

If this sounds familiar here’s a few tips from us to keep visitors interested and engaged with your website which ultimately increases the chances of that enquiry or sale.

Make sure it’s eye-catching

When it comes to websites looks definitely matter so your website has to be attractive at first glance or visitors won’t stay long. Instead they’ll make a quick decision to look elsewhere based on their initial impressions and once that happens you’ve lost them.

Most people will visit your home page first and your drop out rate from it is likely to be high – ie it is the only page many people visit. This means you need to give visitors a flavour for everything and entice visitors to click further into the site.

Your homepage is the hardest working page on your website, think of it as your shop window, not the first chapter. This is where you lay out your stall so it needs to convey your brand values, your personality, what you do and why you are great. Make sure you tell them clearly how you do what you do and why they should choose you. Don’t assume they know! 

This doesn’t mean you can’t use sentences but generally people tend to prefer to browse through a mixture of images, graphics and words rather than having to plough through reams of text heavy content so it’s important to get the balance right and ensure information is in an easy to digest format.

Whilst we wouldn’t advocate being a slave to the latest design trends as they do tend to come and go it is important that you commit to review and refresh your site fairly regularly so that it doesn’t looked out-dated or forgotten! This doesn’t mean you need to redesign your site on a regular basis, it can be something as simple as updating banners and images.

Get to the point

In the time-poor society we now live in the vast majority of your visitors will only skim through your website particularly if they’re viewing it on their phone so you need to keep your content short and to the point.

Give the your visitors bite-sized chunks of useful information that can be quickly "consumed". Content should be easily graspable and able to be consumed faster than reading an explanation of the same information so images, illustrations and short videos are all useful to accompany standard text content.

And present it in an easily digestable and logical format with the most important content featured in prime position on the page. Use headings and subheadings to guide your visitors and always ensure there are clear calls to action on every page.

Add and update content regularly

If you want visitors to stay on the site as well as come back for a return visit, you need to give them a reason to do so. By regularly adding new, relevant and interesting content, people will be more inclined to browse through your site to find out more or come back again at a later date.

Adding new content doesn’t have to be a complex, time-consuming task nor does it need to be cost for your business. With a good content management system you can easily add, edit and delete content yourself without the need for a programmer. A news story, blog post or case study about a recently completed project are all relatively simple but useful content you can add on a regular basis with the added bonus that regular updates to your website are also useful for ranking on Google.

Useful content

Think carefully about your target audience when you’re creating content for your website. What content will be useful to them? The more useful and therefore valuable content on your website then the more likely it is that visitors to your site will stay longer and return at a later date which dramatically increases the chance of an enquiry or potential sale.

Speed matters

If your site is slow to load you will lose visitors and therefore potential buyers. As we’ve discussed already in our world today people want to access their desired information as quickly as possible so if your site can’t deliver that then they’ll give up and move onto another.

To ensure your website runs as quickly as possible your website coding needs to be optimised for the optimum page load times. A good content management system can help with this along with the right hosting package will ensure your website runs as quickly as possible.

If you’d like to talk to us about your website requirement whether that’s help with revamping your current website or building a new one from scratch then we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with us today on 01635 278388 or email joanne@designeclectic.com