7 Tips for Increasing User Engagement on Your Website

Author: Tom Cottrill | Date Posted: Feb 15, 2022

A website is more than just a portfolio to show your products and services to the world—or just your clients. User engagement is an important part of improving your search engine ranking because it helps keep people on your website for longer periods of time (showing relevance) and also helps convert the users because they are able to engage with your website easily, flowing right into a contact or purchase. The higher your engagement, the more loyal your audience typically is.

Why User Engagement is Important for Website Success

User engagement is important for many reasons, not the least of which are that better user engagement helps:

  • Sell products or services
  • Improve customer loyalty and retention
  • Improve conversion rates on your website
  • Keep customers on your website longer, improving SEO
  • Determine customer behavior for improved marketing effectiveness

It’s generally important for more than just user engagement purposes to have your website buttoned up to keep visitors engaged, but also make sure you’re running the right analytics to measure engagement and keep track to better tailor your marketing efforts and know exactly what needs to be done to improve engagement and user experience on your website. Without the right analytics, it’s really just a guessing game.

Tips to Improve Website Engagement

User engagement on a website can be increased numerous ways, and no matter what type of business or website you have, each step you can take to improve engagement translates across all industries. These steps also improve general user experience and search engine optimization anyway, so they’re worth it for a variety of reasons. They can be done during website development or added in after the website has been launched.

How to Increase User Engagement During Web Development

  1. Create a website with a mobile-friendly design. – If a visitor can’t easily use and navigate a mobile version of a website, they will not engage with your content, comment on the blog, or navigate to a contact page or ecommerce store. If a website takes too long to load on mobile, a visitor will leave the site and go find a competitor’s site that loads faster.

  2. Create a website that is easy to navigate. – This fits into the same category as a mobile-friendly website. If visitors get confused trying to find what they are looking for—no matter what that might be—they will end up frustrated and leave the site, lowering your conversion rate and even dinging your rank. This includes having a prominent search box that works well (and actually searches the words they’re trying to search) and is in a location that’s easy to find and use.

  3. Add interactive features to the website. – Interactive features, like interactive maps, qualifying assessments, quizzes, quote calculators, helpful infographics, etc. can all help users engage and get more information they are craving, stay on the website, and also provide relevant content for them.

  4. Build a chatbot to use on your site. – A chatbot allows visitors to get FAQ’s answered immediately, keeps them on a site longer as they ask questions, limits frustration when customers can’t find information, and encourages them to engage with the company when they might not have time to call and ask questions over the phone. It allows visitors in all stages of the buyer’s journey to engage without feeling like they’re going to have sales pushed on them. Plus, it saves you a bunch of time from having to answer the same questions over and over again.

  5. Create a website with fast load time. – Slow-loading pages on a website drive people crazy. Seriously, it makes people want to throw their phones…or at the very least, it makes them want to leave and go to a different site. A Soasta study found that pages loading just one second slower than expected increases bounce rate by 56%. You can test your current website’s page load speed with testers like Pingdom, but having a website designed specifically for performance helps boost SEO and keep people on your site (and improve conversion). Large images and videos slow page speed down, along with too many or outdated plugins.

How to Increase User Engagement After Web Development

  • Publish engaging content. – Writing content as copy or for blogs, creating video blogs, including engaging infographics, and posting content that is relevant, helpful, and engaging for your audience gets your visitors interested in what you’re showing them and keeps them on the site. Content that gets visitors’ attention makes them want to comment on blogs or social media to get some more traffic there, and it can also help you determine what your audience likes and wants to learn (and what mediums work best) and what doesn’t. This is another reason why user engagement metrics matter.
  • Create an internal linking structure that serves you well. – This is crucial for SEO, but it also aids in the navigation of your site. While this ties into building strong navigation during the development process, it is really built during the content creation portion of the process. Use anchor text that is clear so visitors understand where they’re going if they click and that takes them to a place on the site that isn’t easily navigated to in the main menu. It is typically a good rule of thumb to have external links open in new tabs and internal links open in the same tab.
  • Hold contests or giveaways. – This will get people excited about your products or services, if that’s what you’re giving away, and give them an opportunity to try it out before buying. Even if you’re giving away a third-party gift card, a contest or giveaway can build engagement on your site and social media and help you collect email addresses for your list. Try a requirement like subscribing to your blog, sharing your content, or leaving you a review on your website or Google My Business page.

Key Engagement Metrics to Track

The list of metrics is long, and it isn’t just a matter of sticking some plugins on your site and letting it happen, but some of the most important metrics to track user engagement can tell you what visitors are actually doing on your website. 

  • Number of engagements
  • Number of leads
  • Medium that brought the leads
  • Heat maps to show where people are engaging, converting, and abandoning
  • Time on page
  • Pages per session
  • Page views

These metrics can be tracked using simple plugins or more advanced plugins, or you can use a marketing firm to track them for you.

About Ignitro Studios

Since 2013, Ignitro Studios has been working to blend marketing and technology in support of agencies and other marketers. By understanding both sides of web development, we have a unique perspective and advantage within the industry. We provide design, development, project management, QA, and strategy, driving the bus so our clients don’t have to. We will work with our clients to get results while also empowering them to do their job better. Learn more about Ignitro Studios.

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