8 Tips to Increase the Time Visitors Spend on Your Site
The time that users spend on any site is a glaring indication of their feelings about it. Sites which are quickly abandoned after a cursory glance have a big problem which needs to be fixed. When visitors continue to abandon your site in favor of others, it increases your bounce rate which is one of the statistics used for evaluating the weakness or strength of any website. It’s a simple percentage showing the number of users who abandon a site after just a glance at the front page. Having a very high bounce rate means that you are not holding user’s interest long enough to convert them into customers.
As your bounce rate increases, your conversion rate continues to go down and ultimately, your profit will be negatively affected. Check your report under Audience » Overview in Google analytics to get the average time users spend on your site. A very workable average for time-spent metric is largely dependent on the quality of content you offer. If the articles are long and the average time users spend on it is less than some seconds, your attention is urgently needed. The goal of every site owner is to capture user’s attention and hold it long enough for them to spend more time on the site. With the help of an SEO agency, this can be done quite quickly. To get this done yourself, read on to get some few important tips.
Keep a clear navigation
You need to make it easy for people to navigate around your website; don’t make them feel like they need to grope through every page in order to find what they want. Your user experience can be enhanced by very simple as well as well organized menus which also gets users to spend quality time on your site. You need to avoid dead ends by making them accessible from any page.
Build excitement and anticipation
Even before users start coming to your site, it is important to build anticipation and excitement. Visitors need to come to your site with every intension of staying long, not just to go for a particular info and bounce. Strategies abound which you can leverage on to enhance the “clickability” of your internet links, posts as well as search result.
However, avoid straying too far from your vital message just for a few clicks (Earning clicks may not be wrong but when clicks are the empty kind, they offer you no value at all. In fact you will be paying for those clicks and the effects they will have on your site is not very good). Building anticipation and excitement without misleading entails spending quality time on headline creation and title. You might think that it is too much but the head line is the first thing that the user sees and if it happens to be catchy, the user is already in.
Improve Readability
Your website’s bounce rate will simply go through the roof if the font you use are either too small or come in contrast with the color of the background. Web visitor have zero tolerance for sites which they cannot parse or scan easily. This calls for elegant typefaces which are also legible and the content need to be broken up into segments that are easily digested with clearly stated titles so users will instantly know what they have in front of them.
Make Users Feel Comfortable
It is important that users feel very comfortable when they come onto your site and in order to accomplish this, you need to establish trust. When you instill a sense of trust in your users, they will find it easy to engage your brand online. Social proof is among the best ways to establish online trust, other options are available but social proof is unique as it easily cuts through noise to reach users where they need to be seriously engaged on a psychological level.
You can easily leverage on it to draw in users who may otherwise not be familiar with your brand. In the process, you earn more trust, increased sessions as well as reduced bounce rate. Not incorporating this into your site represents quite a huge missed opportunity.
Give Visitors Something to Really Sink Their Teeth Into
Making use of light and fluffy content will earn you some good clicks, but it is very likely that you will experience shorter duration in sessions than you would normally like. Users will always come across your site but getting them to stay long is the problem, so offering them something worthwhile to really sink their teeth into is not a bad idea. The crux of the matter is posting engaging content.
Present day users have very short attention spans and are not likely to sit back and consume a 5,000-word white paper created in size 10 font. What they want are graphics, videos and interactive elements. You need something that is capable of cutting through all the internet noise and make a statement like “This is why you should stick around.”
Tidy Up Your Website Design
Once an average user gets onto a website, it takes a handful of seconds to decide whether to leave or stay. The time window available for you to convince them is a short one and you really need to put your site design in order by cleaning it up. You should always post your most important content first, let it be the first thing visitors will see immediately they land on your website.
Another strategy is to keep your web design clutter free and simple which makes it a whole lot easier to take-in. When you have fewer thing to look at, visitors may likely stay longer since they will find it easier to focus.
Use High Quality Images
Among most engaging part of any content are the images and people prefer to look at images as opposed to reading text. That is the reason behind the use of fullscreen background images on landing pages of some of the most popular sites. So using high quality images on your site will keep visitors longer on your page.
Include Videos for a More Interactive Experience
All over the world, users engage themselves watching hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos on a daily basis. This just point to the fact that people love to watch videos.
Videos are simple the most interactive, effective as well as engaging form of content and adding them to your site will enhance engagement as well as increase the time visitors stay on your site and ultimately convert them to customers.