How to Make Your Site Visitors Stay Longer
SEO, web design, and app development are some of the most important and well utilized marketing techniques online today. Small businesses and large corporations alike make good use of internet marketing to reach out to more people and promote their brand on a larger, wider scale. There is, however, one quality metric that not a lot of people are taking seriously or perhaps overlooking when planning their marketing strategy, and that is bounce rates for site visitors.
It is no secret that the longer visitors stay on your website, the more opportunities you have to encourage them to check out your products or services and eventually, convince them to buy a product or get your services. Additionally, the longer people stay on your site, the credible you appear to major search engines, such as Google and Bing.
The challenge therefore, is to make them stay long enough to fulfill all of these things. In reality though, it is harder to achieve, especially for startup businesses and medium-sized enterprises trying to expand their reach. The phenomenon that is under the spotlight here is called bounce rate, or the percentage of site visitors who, after visiting only one page, leave the site afterwards, literally bouncing off a certain page.
The idea is for site visitors to linger on your website, browse your products and services, and become a customer. If they leave as soon as they landed on your page, then that is a bounce rate. Handling bounce rates requires more than just a single course of action, this is why it is recommend to seek help from a professional web design company in Arizona. They are experts in making people spend longer time on a site. Here are some of their strategies:
Promote Readability through Your Content
Visitors wouldn’t want to stay on your site if they are overwhelmed with long and unbroken text. Seldom do site visitors read content on their first visit. They just scan content and look for specific information that is relevant to their search. Bottom line is, stay away from long, boring content. Keep it short and sweet. Keep your articles at 300 to 500 words, choosing wisely the words and making them easy to read.
Each paragraph should have about three to five sentences only. Break content through subheads and numbered lists or bullet. You may also italicize or bold keywords that need emphasizing. Choose font types and sizes that are easy on the eyes.
Keep ‘Em Busy
The idea is to keep them busy but not overwhelmed. The strategy is to give them ‘tasks’ without them knowing it. One key example is, at the end of an article or blog post, you could place a comment box where they can express their thoughts about what was written.
Suggestions to look into other related posts on the site after they have finished an article is also a good idea. Publishing interesting videos that will give them an option to watch instead of reading, which is always a smart strategy that many businesses are now utilizing. Remember, site visitors cannot read your mind and you cannot let them make wild guesses. You have to tell them what particular actions to take after visiting your site, but in a way that makes it feel forced. Just ask a professional web design company in Arizona for additional strategies similar to this.
Make Your Pages Load Faster
Do not make your site visitors wait. They are not the most patient bunch, so if a website is taking ages to load, they will most probably leave that site and find the next site on the search engine results page with a faster loading site. In a span of a few seconds, all your SEO efforts are thrown into the bin because your site takes too much time loading the pages.
Create an Impressive Web Design and Layout
Last but not the least, the overall appearance of your website can create a pretty large impact on reducing the bounce rate. If they see a website with a great design and allows them to get to where they want to go without much fuzz over where to click, then that will help you retain your site visitors long enough for them to visit the next page. Also, try to avoid pop-ups that act as roadblocks and disrupt user experience.
So make sure your site is professional-looking, if you do not have the resources to hire your own design expert, then hiring a professional web design company in Arizona will do wonders for your website. Keep in mind, though that the look of your site will only work for a few seconds if not partnered with the aforementioned tips.