8 Ways To Maintain Your Traffic’s Interest When On Your Website

ByAlbert Cooper Published

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Website User
Photo via Envato Elements

Congratulations, you’ve managed to create a stunning website, produce content for your audience, get a few organic searches, and generate enough traffic. But before you pat yourself on the back, are your site visitors actually sticking around? 

If they’re not, you may be thinking, what else could you have done? You’re implementing digital knowledge management, producing content regularly, and optimizing for search engines. As a business owner, you obviously want visitors to stay on your website longer and keep them coming back for more content.  

What Is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is one of Google Analytics’ metric to measure the percentage of site visitors who only views a single page on your website, then leaves. In short, the amount of time a user spends on your website could mean several things. A page visit that lasts no longer than a minute may be happening because of poor load speeds. In other cases, users may feel overwhelmed or unsatisfied with your content. 

What Are The Ways To Keep Visitors On Your Site Longer?

If your website is struggling in these aspects, read on to discover various ways to maintain your web traffic’s interest.

Improve Website Load Speed 

Website load speed is an essential facet that business owners tend to overlook. Since your visitors’ average attention span is less than eight seconds, you need a website that loads up as quick as the speed of light. At best, your website should be loaded entirely no longer than two seconds after clicking. 

Think about it. If your visitor is coming from an organic search, you’re actually competing with nine other search results! This means your website is at your user’s disposal. Regardless of how relevant and value-adding your content is, if visitors can consume them right away, you’ll lose them to your competitors.

Simplify Navigation And User Experience 

Besides providing the best content possible, your website’s goal should also include ease of access to information for your users. If you’ve ever been on a website that’s hard to navigate, you know very well how that can affect the user experience negatively. 

A simple and easy to navigate website with clear menus and dropdown options elevates the user experience and is more inviting for them to stick around. In designing your website, avoid using too many elements. Keep everything simple and minimal. Too much of anything could only disrupt your users and make them feel lost in your website.

Ensure Mobile-Friendliness 

The majority of web traffic these days comes from mobile searches. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile use, you miss out on half of the web traffic your website could be getting right at this moment. 

Mobile phones and desktop computers are two different screen real estate. A mobile-friendly website means users can easily navigate through your website using their mobile phones. That entails keeping a unified user experience and accessibility on a desktop and smartphone.  

If your website is due for a refresh, you can find plenty of responsive mobile website templates for free or with a small price tag. Responsive web templates are easy to navigate and costs less time than learning to code to design your website. 

Provide Value-Adding Content 

People use search engines to ask their most pressing questions. And if they happen to stumble upon your website, you need to supply them with the answer they’re looking for and more.

The more value you provide to your users, the more likely they’ll stay on your website and keep coming back. Produce content that’s relevant to your target audience. Avoid the tendency to write a blog post you think users need. Instead, focus on what users are already searching for. 

Make sure the content you put out gives a clear overview of what the users should expect. Much of what you’ll find online are full fluff to clickbait users. 

Focus On Readability 

Another ingredient to content that ranks and sticks is readability. Have you ever seen a blog post that contains walls upon walls of texts? How did you feel about it? If you felt overwhelmed, then you’re not alone. 

Many beginner website owners think that creating value-adding content or articles is the same as writing an essay in college. But the truth is content writing and essay writing are two different writing techniques that can’t co-exist, especially not on your website. 

Forget about the writing rules you learned in college. Skip using those big, academic words to make your content sound smart. Keep your texts readable. It would be even better if you can incorporate a tone where readers will feel you’re speaking directly to them. 

Here’s a list of things you can do to improve the articles you publish on your website: 

  • Include subheadings to break your content into easily digestible sections. 
  • Avoid long blocks of texts as this might overwhelm your readers. As a rule of thumb, cut paragraphs down to two to three sentences. 
  • Add relevant images to your content to promote its visual appeal. 
  • Make a bullet or numbered list when enumerating items or steps.

Building internal links is the process of cross-referencing related content to a single page on your website. To put it simply, internal links are like footnotes you add to your content in case visitors would like to learn more about particular information.  

Adding relevant internal links on your page can increase page views, time on your website and drive visitors deeper into your products.  

Make sure to consider the relevance of the content you’d like to link to your article. Use compelling and keyword-rich anchor text to help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well.  

Produce Multimedia Content 

In most cases, site visitors won’t have the time to read, say, a 10,000-word article about the beginner’s guide to photography. However, you can widen their options by accompanying that same article with a quick 5-minute video, summarizing your piece’s contents. 

Posting videos, audio recordings, podcasts, infographics, and other multimedia content is an excellent way to keep your audience entertained and engaged in your website. So, if you’re only posting articles on your website, consider producing multimedia content next time and see how well your audience receives it.

Encourage Visitors To Act 

Have you ever wondered why each blog post, YouTube video, and even podcast seems like they always end with the call-to-action ‘leave a comment…’? It’s because it invites their audience to engage with the content.  

If you really want visitors to stick around, you need to ask them to do something for you. Here are a few calls-to-action you can use on your website to increase engagement: 

  • Post their opinion in the comment section. 
  • Check out related posts they might be interested in. 
  • Subscribe to your newsletter. 
  • Follow your social channels. 

Don’t be afraid to ask your visitors to do something. After all, if you’ve given them enough value, chances are, they’ll provide value back and trust your website. 

Takeaway 

As the digital space begins to overturn brick-and-mortar business, market competition continues to be aggressive. Your edge? Building trust with your audience through value-adding content, an easy-to-access website, and consistency. As you increase web traffic, always ensure that your users are having the time of their lives in your website. 

Albert Cooper is a known content writer from California, USA. He writes content in different niches such as social media marketing, finance, business etc. He’s a daytime blogger and night time reader currently working as a chief content advisor for some business and finance groups. He enjoys pie, as should all right-thinking people.