User engagement on your website is an important indicator helping boost the ranking of your site. When potential leads visit your site it’s critical to engage visitors and get them to perform the desired action. We’ve asked a panel of digital marketing experts to share their top tips for improving website engagement to help with your website engagement efforts.
- Above the fold
Linnae Harris of LINNAE designs & marketing says “In today’s world with so many online choices, you have to make sure your above-the-fold plan is solid. What is above-the-fold anyways? This is a term that refers to the printed newspaper. When the paper is folded, everything you can see on top is called “above-the-fold” and it’s the most important part of the paper.
With websites, the above the fold area is what you can see before you start scrolling. As being the most important part of your site, this is where you need to capture your audience’s attention and it happens in about 3-5 seconds.”
Seth Richtsmeier of Champ Internet Solutions adds “A new visitor will decide in a matter of seconds if they feel they’re in the right place. If your business sells houseplants, for example, don’t use jargon by saying you offer green solutions for living spaces. It’s vague and people may bounce. Just say you have houseplants for sale and include a click-able button that points to your shop page, thus improving engagement and keeping people on your site with clarity.”
- Page speed
Josh Imhoff of Always Relevant Digital advises “Slow loading pages can be the death of a user’s website experience. Not only does this affect how engaged people are with your site, but it also directly affects Google’s new Core Web Vitals ranking update which takes into account page speed and engagement as well.
Some ways we’ve increased page speed and thereby website engagement is by ensuring all images are properly sized, using a CDN to distribute them across the world’s servers, and compressing Javascript files with Gzip.”
- HTML titles and descriptions
Will Scott of Search Influence states “Website engagement happens when the visitor can’t wait to see (or click) what comes next. Whether in the search results, on-page, or in your calls to action, if you’re not telling the story of why that next action is important you can’t engage that visitor.
Your website’s HTML titles and descriptions are some of the most important content on your pages. They are like your elevator pitch to searchers. These are what are typically displayed in the search engine results. Those search results usually highlight words in the content of your title and description that match the user’s search. These are your chance to sell the searcher on why they should click you. In fact, if you write a compelling enough title and description, you may get the click even when you don’t rank first. Of course, you’ve then got to fulfill the promise with great content on-page, too.”
- Use video
Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls says “In a mobile first world, you have less time to grab people, attention spans are shorter than ever so video has been used even more to show vs tell for maximum impact. Video does not have to be expensive though, it just needs to educate, inform or entertain in a way that is timely and relevant so that people find it useful and ideally pass it along. When video becomes viral it can reach well beyond any investment made to create it so it is worth the marketing dollars to get it right. The key is to connect with your audience on an emotional level. Sometimes the cheapest ideas have the most impact, remember the ALS ice bucket challenge? Those videos cost nothing to create and post and they connected with people to raise millions of dollars for a great cause. Video will continue to grow in importance after the crisis passes with the majority of people accessing the internet via a mobile device now. AR and VR in particular when used strategically are a big competitive advantage to accelerate engagement with your customers so use it to help them answer questions, connect and buy.”
- Heatmapping
Niles Koenigsberg of FiG Advertising + Marketing advises “Install heatmapping software on your site! There are many different platforms out there that can provide this service for your site; all you need to do is copy and paste some tracking code onto the back-end of your site and the tool will start to track how users engage with your site. Heatmaps will highlight where users are clicking on your site, which can help you pinpoint navigational issues, ways to improve the user experience, and opportunities to add new engaging content to encourage more conversions.
For instance, after all allowing your heatmap to track visitors for a month, the resulting heatmap could reveal that your users are clicking on numerous icons on your homepage that don’t have any links. That data might suggest that your visitors want more information, so you could develop new pages of content that link to those icons or you could develop small blurbs that appear when users hover over those icons. As you make those changes, you’ll likely improve the user experience, which will ultimately lead to greater conversions and site visitor retention rates.
At our agency, we use Hotjar for our heatmapping purposes. This handy tool lets us track how users are interacting with our site and where they are clicking the most. This software additionally allows us to anonymously record user experiences on the site, so that we can see in real time where they are clicking, how they are navigating our sites, and ways that we could improve their user experience the next time they visit our page. Overall, it is a fantastic tool that we look at every month to make sure our clients’ sites are well-optimized for the user experience.”
- Chat bots
Jonathan Zacharias of GR0 states “Chatbots have helped us optimize our connection with potential customers and brand development. The chat feature allows us to open a point of contact with ease. Alongside efficient communication, we also have the ability to record interactions with customers which can serve the purpose of training and team development.
Choosing the right chatbot software is all about centering the needs of your possible clients. Customers are likely to continue doing business with you if they can easily navigate your chat feature and leave the conversation with all of their questions answered and inquiries resolved because they will trust you to be reliable and receptive to customer engagement.”
In conclusion, user engagement on your website is an important indicator helping boost the ranking of your site. Stacking your efforts will not only result in more engagement but will help you to create an attractive, interactive, and user-friendly website.