The Time Visitors Spend on Your Website is Important
Introduction
SEO strategies will get more visitors to your website, but unless there is something to keep the users there, they will bounce as quickly as they arrive.
There is an inverse relationship between users who actively engage with your website and the user bounce percentages.
A website is said to have increased stickiness, when the amount of time that users are spending on that website increases.
In this article we talk about 5 ways that websites have increased their user interactivity.
Website Design
An excellent starting place for any website which wants to increase their user retention begins with the choices made by your web designer.
Every page on your website platform needs to be implemented mindful that a visitor could potentially land on it.
Visitors who land on pages cluttered with unimportant irrelevant content will not spend much time sorting through the mess.
Navigation that is difficult and heavily nested discourages user interaction. The navigation should be easy to follow, making it clear where a user needs to click to get the information they desire.
When it comes to interfaces, creative websites can be very powerful.
One area that can be problematic involves stylesheet schemes which don’t allow hyperlinks to stand out, such schemes should be avoided.
Engaging & Updated Content
Engaging content addresses your visitors needs. It’s entertaining and provides value which your web audience cannot find elsewhere. Images should be professionally produced and ideally have relevant and impacting captions.
Updating your content frequently is a must. Your visitors will come back looking for something new.
Ensure that your content allows key information easily found by bulleted lists, bold headings and short paragraphs.
Encourage Social Media Sharing
Having great content will definitely increase the time your visitors spend on your website.
Providing social media buttons and encouraging content sharing extends this concept even further, allowing your audience to share your website’s powerful messages with other users.
Video Content
When it’s well implemented, video content has extremely high stickiness.
Video content needs to be relevant, valuable, informative and regularly updated.
Giving your visitors a series of short informative videos on subjects of interest to them can increase the amount of time that they spend on your website by as much as four-fold. It also encourages sharing and return visits.
As a standard practice and as a courtesy to your users, be sure not to have videos auto-play when your page loads. Doing so, can cause the opposite of your intended result by increasing the bounce rate from your visitors who load your page from a device on full volume.
Blogs & Surveys
What better way to increase the amount of time that your users are spending on your website than to ask them to rate your content and how it addressed their needs? Surveys and blogs are a great way to solicit feedback. Visitors who post on your website’s blog are far more likely to return and check for an answer and even continue to contribute more traffic to blog.
Final Thoughts
SEO techniques can get more visitors to your website. However, once there, a web user will quickly click away unless his immediate needs are met. A website platform which solicits feedback, encourages sharing, has blogs, virtual website, provides video content and is well designed and easily navigable encourages your users to spend more time during their interactions and to explore your additional offerings. Of course having a web designer that specializes in creative websites is a must.
