7 ways to keep visitors on your website longer

Every website owner aims to keep their visitors engaged for as long as possible, right? Apart from the apparent reason of keeping them engaged to educate them and finally selling your business to them, do you know that the average time that a user spends on your website has a significant impact on your search engine ranking?

Well, that’s the reality, and Google loves and favors websites that keep its audience engaged and rewarded them by ranking them high in their search engine. Therefore keeping your audience engaged more than your competitions can have a lot of positive impact on your business.

This brings you to the fact that one of the ways of finding your way to the first page of Google searches is by keeping your visitors on your website. This indeed makes sense as for why will any search engine want to rank your site as the most relevant when there is every likelihood that the user bounces off the moment they get to your website.

Now that we all agree that keeping your audience engaged is very much crucial to organic traffic, the next problem to solve is how to improve the time an average user spends on your website. In this article, we will be revealing some of the best ways in which you can keep your site visitors longer on your site.

1. Do justice to your headline

Getting people to click on the headlines of your website for traffic is one thing. If you are interested in keeping your visitors longer on your site, you must ensure that the contents you provide match the headline that you give as well. Don't let your hunger for website traffic push you into making headlines filled with promises that you cannot fulfill.

You should always know that a crafty headline coined by the most gifted copywriter will have no impact on your business if the overall content of your website does not live anywhere close to the hype.

2. Create contents that are more "scannable"

Do you know that according to studies carried out, more than 60% of site visitors spend less than 15 seconds checking out your website? People do not have the luxury of the time to go through your contents word for word. Majority of online users will instead scan through the page to draft out essential phrases and words.

If your entire content is filled with very long sentences and paragraphs, then it will be pretty hard for them to scan through and no one will stick around for long. They will prefer to search for a website with contents that are much easier to consume. Below are some of the tips that will help your contents to be more scannable:

• Make use of bulleted lists: This stands out uniquely from your texts and helps your readers with relevant facts.
• Employ the purpose of engaging subheadings: a subheading that is well crafted can spur some curiosity in your visitors and helps keep their interest in your website alive.
• Split up your contents: This makes them more comfortable for the eyes to scan through.
• Increase readability: Make sure that your chosen font size and type are large enough to be easily read.

3. Insert call-to-actions at the end of every post

The perfect time to request your visitors to take action is after they have finished reading through your blog post. Online visitors just tend to take their leave once they’ve been able to gather the information that they need. But making use of an appropriate CTA might give them just yet another reason to explore your website.

The question that you might want to ask is if those call-to-actions that are placed below your content get all the attention that they require. The sad truth is no, and one of the best ways to combat this is by making use of an animated slide in that grabs the attention of the audience without pissing them off.

4. Add helpful contents to your thank you pages

The moment a site visitor engages your call to action, they usually have little or no business with you any longer. This is mostly true especially when your email subscription thank you page does not provide any additional beneficial content to leverage on the interest of the site visitor.

The thank you page of your website should do much more than just confirm your subscription. You can employ this medium to engage them by hinting relevant and useful contents on your site to them.

5. Employ the use of videos

A lot of online users now prefer to watch videos than reading some bunch of texts. According to a survey carried out, more than 50% of the surveyed executives admit that they will prefer to watch a video instead of reading the texts. A good question to ask yourself is if you have been offering your site visitors the option of getting information through videos.

Adding videos to your site might first appear as a herculean task. However, it is not as complicated as it appears. You can easily create videos by converting your text contents into a presentation.

6. Work on your page loading time

One of the most crucial factors to keep your visitors glued is reducing the time it takes for your site to load. Having the best content in the world will become useless when no one has the patience to wait for your site to load. According to studies, even a second delay in the page response on your website can lead to about 7% reduction in conversions. There are a lot of things to keep in check to reduce your page loading time such as image compression, CDN (Content Delivery Network), etc.

7. Make use of exit intent popup

With the use of an exit intent popup, there is a possibility for you to detect when a site visitor decides to leave your website and prompt them for a targeted campaign to engage them. Exit intent popups are very effective as they grab the attention of the reader without annoying them. Some of the few things that you can do with an exit intent popup are as follows:

• Recommend some popular blog posts to them
• Offer them some gifts in return for joining your email list
• Invite them to have a chat with one of your support agent.

Conclusion

Getting traffic to your website alone does not guarantee the success of your website. Keeping your site visitors engaged for as long as you can to make them take action is what gets the job done. Employ the use of the techniques described above and watch as visitors stay glued to your site.