The first point of interaction between your brand and your audience is your website. How you provide information to your visitors is what engages them with your website and make them fiddle across different pages.
Your visitors and the actions they take determine whether your website has value or not and website engagement is a measure of how well your website persuade visitors to take the actions you define.
Your website’s design and content should be moulded according to your audience. This will make it easy for you to sell your product or service. When people arrive at your website, they take considerable steps towards the actions you define. Normally these actions are described using the umbrella term ‘Engagement’. And when it comes to website engagement, a lot of people make some common yet big mistakes as soon as they start developing and designing their websites. Below we are listing 5 changes you can make to fix website engagement issues.
1. Pay attention to what terms your audience use
Let us start with the notion of understanding your target audience. The first thing you need to understand is what your audience want to read, listen and see online. In this highly connected digital world, people are targeted with hundreds of thousands of pieces of content every day. More than half of that content is either irrelevant or unqualified.
Audit your current content; if it does not relate to your target audience, it is time that you need to revamp it. Put yourself in your customer’s/audience’s shoe and then think. Once you start thinking from your audience’s view, you will be able to find problems in your content.
Find the terms your audience use to find solutions to their problems and include those terms in your website content. A good way to start this is conducting keyword research. You can use Google’ Keyword Planner to start keyword research. You will also need to monitor social channels of your target audience so you are aware of their problems, how they define them and what type of solutions they want.
Once you know how your audience interacts with the web, you will also understand their problems, the terms they use to find solutions to those problems. Start creating your content using those terms.
People love personalized content so tailor it according to your audience’s needs to stand out among the noise.
2. Start writing blogs
There are umpteen benefits of blogging. And one of the best advantages of blogging is it improves website engagement. Blogging gives your business a heads up in developing a sense of touch on matters, problems and interests of your prospects. In addition to this, you can share what you and your employees are passionate about. Your blog gives you a distinctive chance to share your voice and style, building up trust and boosting the likeability quotient of your brand.
A few benefits of writing blogs
- Increases leads
Generating leads from a blog is a low hanging, ripened fruit. Once your blog starts getting traction, you can offer numerous helpful resources to your readers in return for their information. You can then start nurturing those leads and move them down to your sales funnel. - Enhances conversion rates
Not everyone will contact you upfront through your website. However, if your blog has really engaging content, then your readers will opt-in to read more of your stuff. Also, if you have something valuable to offer that your visitors cannot put down, a blog is a great place to highlight that offer through a Call-to-Action (more on call-to-action below). - Helps create inbound links and get social shares
Website pages are not always favourable to generate links as they are geared more with sales content. Blog posts, however, offer solutions to problems and people love it, share it and link to it. - Improves your rank for long tail search queries
A website with no blog might possess a hard time standing for long tail search queries. Long tail keywords carry high conversion potential and a blog is a great place to target those keywords. - Supports your social media platforms
Without high-quality content, it is difficult to maintain active social media presence. Sharing your solution oriented blog posts is a great way to improve you website engagement.
3. Make your website easy to navigate
A simple and organized navigation will keep you from losing visitors unnecessarily. With heavy content overload on a website, it becomes difficult for your visitors to search what they are looking for. If you have ever been to a website and you happen to be hopeless to find what you were searching for, you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.
Every page on your website should be easily accessible and should not be buried down under clusters of menu items. Pro Tip: Pay attention to designing your menu. It is best to integrate a search option which will give easy accessibility to important pages on your website.
In addition to navigation, the color scheme of your website also plays a vital role in improving website engagement. It is highly recommended to maintain uniformity in colours of your website. Perform extensive research while choosing colors for your website. The colors you choose should complement your business and should have a soothing effect on your audience’s eyes. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing and think how you can make it better.
4. Make your content easy to digest and informative
Human mind thinks in images. It creates an image of everything it reads and listens. And as the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, you have to have visuals in your content to talk to your audience. Including visuals in content makes it a lot more worthy, memorable and shareable. This article has enough proofs for this.
I would not go ahead without discussing infographics. Infographics is a great way to present content in an un-boring, interesting format. A lot of people skim through text and prefer information in the visual format (the link in the above paragraph has some stats about infographics as well). Again, visual content is more liked.
The next element you need to focus on in your content is information. The more informative and proof-driven your content is, more interesting it becomes to read. Include references and proofs to what you are writing.
The last but not the least element you need to focus on is formatting. Even if you are writing lengthy blog posts (see Neil Patel’s blog), ebooks, reports or any type of content, if it is not formatted well, it will not be liked. Use compelling headings, sub-headings, bullet points, font size and font color. Always break big paragraphs and big sentences into small ones and pay attention to punctuation.
5. Call-to-Actions
Your website has great design and content. However, if you are not using call-to-actions, you are missing out on opportunities to convert your visitors into leads and customers. You’re running a business to make money, right? You require leads and sales to make this happen. This is where CTA’s help.
Based on your type of business, your call to actions would vary. You can try many formats of CTAs on your website like text CTA, button CTA, contextualized CTA, live chat, etc. You can also put your CTAs in pop-ups as it is a great way to capture leads if done strategically. Quick tip: Pay special attention to placement, timing and messaging of pop-up windows as if not handled properly, it can, in fact, affect your website’s engagement as people hate interruptions.
Quick Guidelines for CTAs:
- Try more than one version and A/B test different versions
- Try different offers and A/B test them
- Try different placements on your pages
- Avoid writing “Submit” on the buttons as much as you can. Always have a more compelling verb and make it personalized. For example: Get Your Guide, Get Free Consultation, Start Free Trial, Calculate Now, etc.
- Use different colors to make them stand out
- If possible, include a sense of urgency. For example: Last 3 hours of Festive Sale, Only 1 day left to get your free pair of gloves, etc.