5 Ways to Answer the Question “What is the Best Way to Increase Engagement on Your Website?”
Building a website is certainly a mountain one should be proud to climb. Selling a product or receiving an inquiry about your service is another feat worth a pat on the back. However, consistently having engagement as well as increasing engagement on a regular basis is an accomplishment that is difficult to come by.
When looking at the question “what is the best way to increase engagement on your website?” there a few key tactics that every website should do to increase engagement. In this article, we will look at 5 of those tactics. Some of these tips may be new to you while others may be areas you’re just completely overlooking. Either way, we hope we can point you in the right.
A 3-Step Formula to Increase Engagement on Your Website
The formula we use with most of these sections is pretty simple. Drive Traffic > Intrigue Your Traffic > Educate Your Traffic. Each tip will fall into one or multiple areas of that process/flow. The idea is to create a continuous cycle that keeps engagement steadily rising.
Improve Your Page Load Time
This area falls in between driving and intriguing your traffic. To have the chance to intrigue, you need keep users on your site.
A 2017 Google page load time study shows that the bounce rate probability for a 3-second page load time hovers around 32%. That bounce rate jumps to 90% for page load times of 5 seconds. What a difference a few seconds make! So, it’s important to ensure your page load time is clicking on all cylinders. Here a few quick tips on improving your page load time:
- Optimize Your Images – Make sure your images are in a standard format (JPG, PNG, GIF). Also, use image optimization and external picture editor tools to downsize and compress images.
- No Broken Links – All links on your website should go to a logical and safe place.
- Decrease Cookie Size – Remove needless cookies or decrease the size of your website’s cookies.
- Don’t Have Inline JS and CSS files – Keep your website’s JS and CSS in external files.
Use SEO Best Practices
This would fall into the “driving traffic” portion of our formula. The three pillars of SEO are keywords, links and quality content. And the interesting thing about SEO is that it builds on itself. What we mean by that is good SEO practices will lead into an uptick in traffic and when users find your “quality content” once they land, they will engage with it. Then, this engagement will be rewarded by search engines, as it will identify the content as relevant and quality. Therefore, it creates a cycle that, as we said, builds on itself. Its why SEO is quite the worthy investment.
For the keywords portion of the 3 pillars, you can use any of the major tools to discover keywords (we like and use Moz). The areas you want to integrate your keywords are:
- Headline
- Subhead
- H Tags
- Image Alt Tags
- Content Body
It’s important to find keywords that are relevant to your product or service, because one of the ways SEO best practices improves engagement is by ensuring your website visitors are landing on pages that are relevant to their search. If the wrong pages are ranking or they’re ranking for irrelevant keywords, you’re going to have a high bounce rate.
For links, there are a number of ways to attack this. The general philosophy with links is that you want to create an ecosystem of links. Linking to and from other areas on your website as well as backlinks from your email and social media posts. Finally, you also want to include external links in your content and backlinks from external websites with a high domain authority. We’ve already covered the power of guest blogs extensively.
As for the content pillar, this bring us to our next point:
Consistently Improve and Update Your Content
This topic covers all three portions of our formula – drive, intrigue and educate. When producing optimized content that covers keyword-focused topics, you’ll (eventually) produce traffic. From that point, the content needs to intrigue. This means offering a unique opinion or structure to topics that have most likely already been covered. For the educating portion, you’ll want to easily transfer your readers from blog topics to content about your product. You will need to write about topics that are relevant to your product to do that.
At this point, being concise with the opportunity to learn more about your product at the user’s own pace is typically the best way to educate. This is why content, or copy, is so crucial, it literally carries all three phases of the formula.
Another way to use copy to improve engagement is to let users know they’ve came to the right place when they land on your website. So, make sure to have clear headlines that communicate what you do and how your product can help. You should be bold and interesting with these headlines.
If you agree writing better copy is the best answer to “What is the Best Way to Increase Engagement on Your Website?” then this piece will offer some really good insight: How to Start Writing Creative Copy That is Engaging and Fresh
Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone
Whether you’re selling a product, service, news, insights or just pure entertainment on your website, it’s important to stay fresh. New, existing and returning users/customers will appreciate it. We challenge you to add one dimension to your website that is nothing like anything you have right now. It’s important to try things and see what sticks. When you don’t evolve, whether it be your product or the presentation of it, you end up like Blockbuster. Try to be more of a Netflix, ya know?
To get the juices flowing on how to try something new with your website, here are a few ideas:
- Podcast – This has been a growing trend for years now. A podcast covering your industry can stick if done the right way. Just make sure you find an interesting host and format that lends to your concept.
- Widgets – Widgets are easy to plugin and can offer some interesting ways to engage the reader. If you’re a WordPress site, they offer quite a few and many of them are free.
- Personality Quizzes – A fun way to offer interactive content to your reader. The tricky part is relating them back to your industry.
- A Broader Scope of Blog Topics – I think this is one that more people should try. If you’re an HVAC company, don’t just write about how to change your air filter. Cover news topics that are related to the weather, write an opinion piece about global warming, just try to get out of your sandbox a bit and see if readers dig it.
- Video – It cost money, it takes time but people like video.
- New logo – Consider changing up your logo to stay fresh in your customer’s eyes.
- Brand Refresher – Take the logo idea a step further and do a whole brand refresh. New logo, alter your colors a bit, change taglines and promotions. Once again, stay fresh.
What is the Best Way to Increase Engagement on Your Website? Sometimes You Just Need to Put Some Money Behind It!
If you’re lacking engagement on your website, then adding more targeted traffic could be the solution. Online ads cost money and they aren’t perfect but if executed thoughtfully and correctly they can help. Here are few worthy pieces of reading material that will put you in the right direction.
Covers social media content strategies and influencer marketing. If you’re looking to spend, I’d take a look at the influencer marketing section. The payoff can be big.
We take a deep dive into Google Ads and SEM. We cover quite a few helpful tactics, including keyword targeting, the quality score, ad extensions, adjusting based off performance and more.
So, what was the question? What is the best way to increase engagement on your website? Well, we hope we pushed you into the right direction by either trying something new, revisiting some past tactics you left behind or improving a current tactic you’re using today.
Remember, engagement isn’t something you need to overthink, it’s simply giving the reader options and putting some effort into its presentation. Happy hunting!
