How To Make Your Website More Engaging
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How many visitors do you get to your website every month?
Chances are, I’d guess you know that number. After all, there is a lot to be said for website traffic. If no one visits your site, then the chances of building out your customer base is pretty diminished.
But, website traffic isn’t the only number that matters.
What marketers are paying more and more attention to now is engagement.
That is, what do those visitors do once they get to your site. Do they read a few sentences of a blog post and click away? Or, do they read to the end of your post and download the free ebook you offer at the end?
The difference between these two actions can say quite a bit about how engaging your website really is, and that matters quite a bit.
Unfortunately, too many sites have far more people popping in and leaving, and not enough people sticking around and interacting. Just look at the stats:
Image via Embertribe
Those are scary numbers, right?
Before you get too depressed, there is good news. There are relatively simple strategies you can use to help keep visitors on your website longer and get them actively engaging with your content.
In this post, you’ll learn five ways to increase the engagement on your website.
Know Your Data
Wait, data?
Yup, you got it. It’s really hard to know both why your website visitors are leaving and what posts or pages your visitors are leaving from without any data. When it comes to something as important as this, you don’t want to be making any guesses.
Here’s where you can use a number of tools to help make this a little bit easier:
- Google Analytics: The classic data analytics tool, this lets you see where people come from and how they navigate your site.
- CrazyEgg Heat Map: This is another great tool you can use to physically see exactly where people are clicking when they hit your site.
- Qualaroo: Another way to find out what visitors like? Ask them. This is what a tool like Qualaroo does, it allows you to have a pop up on page survey to ask visitors specific questions.
Just by implementing a few simple tools, you’re going to be able to see the actions your site visitors take right away. This is going to help you know exactly what changes to implement and start seeing changes, rather than making a bunch of changes and hoping something catches the eye of your website visitors.
Offer Something Special
It never ever hurts to surprise and delight your website visitors by offering them something special. No matter what kind of business you run, having a content strategy that offers your readers a ton of extra value is always a good thing.
One way to approach this is by offering extra information at the end of every blog post you write. This can be considered a ‘content upgrade’ and a lot of popular sites and bloggers have been using these the past few years to increase engagement.
The idea is simple, create additional content like a checklist, blueprint, resource guide or spreadsheet that tie into the content in the post and offer it to readers in exchange for their email address.
Brian Dean of Backlinko used the idea of a content upgrade to his site and saw the conversion rate increase by 785% from .54% to 4.82%. This is an amazing result that not only helped grow his email list, but also kept people on his site longer and clicking.
Create Interactive Content
Interactive content is one perfect way of getting website visitors to increase their engagement on your website. The reason behind it is simple, people love being curious, they love finding new information, and consumers today really want personalized content.
Interactive content provides all of that in one, which is why the conversion and interaction rates on this type of content are typically much higher than other types of content.
Think of the BuzzFeed style quiz, for example:
Case studies have found that this type of content “can lead to conversions at a rate 4 times higher than that of normal CTAs.“
Who wouldn’t like to see those numbers?
Repurpose Content
Not all people consume content in the same way. Some people absolutely love consuming via podcasts, while others love nothing more than infographics.
While you might think that it would be way too time consuming to take create all different types of content, it’s actually way easier if you simply repurpose the content that you already have.
Take this example from Jay Baer from Convince and Convert. Once a week he creates a podcast which he then repurposes into 8 different pieces of additional content, both for his own site and to share other places (and that doesn’t even count social media sharing):
- Youtube video
- Facebook page video
- iTunes episode
- Video iTunes episode
- Episode of JayToday.TV
- Blog post
- Linkedin post
- Medium post
Now take that concept and apply that to your own site. Find your popular posts and repurpose that content to make keep people on your site, make it into a quiz, create an eBook or an infographic, the more ways you can share content, the better.
Related Content
More often than not, whatever content you’ve written on your site there’s going to be more related content that covers the same topic, or a related topic.
What you want to do is highlight this content at the bottom of your post. This is good for a couple of reasons, by showcasing related content, those readers who do read your post will find more information on a topic they are already interested in.
More likely than not, they are going to click on this new content and keep reading, keeping the time on your site up and also building a relationship.
There are a couple of easy plugins you can use to highlight related content:
You can use these tools to pick related posts, as well as highlight any content that you know from your data is already popular.
Final Thoughts
Building engagement is one of the most important things you can do for your brand. Readers who are more engaged are those who are typically more loyal and build long term relationships with a brand.
Help to cultivate this relationship by making your website more interactive and engaging for visitors. You won’t be sorry.
Now it’s your turn, what have you done to increase the engagement on your website?
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