Tips to Keep Your Visitors Longer on Your Website Read more in Duct Tape Marketing by John Jants
You invest a lot of time, effort and money in developing a website for your business. That’s why you want to make sure it’s grabbing people’s attention and giving them the information they need to feel good about doing business with you.
But no one can know what you are doing in a second or two. You should keep visitors’ attention long enough to know what they need to learn about your business. And while you can’t control a stranger’s attention span, there are some things you can do to encourage your visitors to stay on your website longer.
Put your value proposition front and center
Prospects are coming to your website because they have a problem. The most important thing to them when your page loads is, “Can this business solve my problem?”
If you make it hard for visitors to determine what you do, they will quickly lose interest. Google throws out hundreds of thousands of search results in an instant. A confused prospect can try and easily find another business that is clear about their value proposition and how they can fix the issue.
Your value proposition should be a sentence at the top of your landing page that simply and elegantly highlights what you do. And it should be something that speaks specifically to your ideal customer—it won’t be something everyone can relate to. For more information on how to find your ideal value proposition, check out this post.
write better copy
Part of keeping people engaged is presenting your information in an interesting way. There is a right way and a wrong way to write website copy. Long, jargon-filled paragraphs and useless headlines are a great way to confuse and alienate your audience.
Stick to short, punchy headings that clearly demonstrate what the reader can expect to find on any given page. Paragraphs should be no longer than four sentences, and those sentences should be brief.
Focusing on how the copy can fulfill your value proposition and your call to action on each page can help you define exactly what you need from your writing.
create informative content
The best way to build trust and keep your visitors on your site is to prove that you have the expertise to solve their problems. And the best way to do that is to fill your site with informative content.
Blog posts that provide rich information and actionable steps for readers are a great place to start. Once you’ve created content that is meaningful to your audience, consider grouping it on hub pages. These pages allow you to centralize information on a given topic, which is helpful for visitors looking for answers, and also increases your site’s SEO.
Outside of written material, you want to mix things up. Diverse content keeps people engaged. Work to incorporate video into your strategy. In addition to website copy, think about infographics and other ways to present relevant information. People’s learning styles vary, so creating content in different forms allows you to capture the attention of all your prospects.
think about the structure
How you structure the information on your website can help you retain your audience. Think about it from a storytelling perspective. Every story has a beginning, middle and end. For brands, the beginning of your story is your proposal to solve a potential person’s problem. The middle is how you do it, and the end customer is likely to convert.
When you think about it this way, it lets you be smart about how you structure your website. Your landing page should address the prospect’s problem. The pages below that in the hierarchy support your initial value proposition, and provide visitors with more specific information about how you can fix their problem. In the end, it gets them to a place where they can make a purchase or talk to your sales team.
Be Smart with Call to Action
Calls to action are not only a way to keep your visitors on your website longer, they are a great way to build trust and increase conversions.
Set a goal for each page of your website, and have a relevant CTA that promotes related conversions. That conversion could be a collection of email addresses to add them to a mailing list or a relevant white paper to be sent to them. This can set up a call with a sales representative to discuss your product offering. Or it can be as simple as sending them to a relevant blog post on your site.
When your call-to-action is tailored to the information on each page, you are ensuring a higher rate of conversion because visitors to that page are interested in that topic. CTAs provide you with the opportunity to provide them with additional information that proves your authority and credibility as a brand. Plus, you’re able to get more valuable information about your prospects that you can use to greet them with additional tailored offers in the future.
Don’t Forget the Technical Elements
While it is important that you are providing prospects with the information and elements they need to see on your website, it is also important that your site remains behind the scenes. Things like quick page load times are important to keep your visitors on your website. How many times have you been staring at a blank page for a few seconds before clicking back to Google search results to see the next site down? If you’re concerned about how your site loads, check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how you stack up.
It is also important to have a mobile friendly site. Most searches these days are on mobile devices, so if your site doesn’t look good on a phone, that audience will quickly turn you away.
The longer you can keep your audience on your website, the more shot you have at winning their trust. When you follow the steps above, you are setting up your business to impress and capture visitors, which in turn will lead to positive results on your conversions and bottom line.
If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Website Design.
