Digitalization has sought the attention of business owners who have started focusing on their websites, content, keywords, meta titles, etc., for engaging customers and increasing conversions.
Though network traffic was the focal point of most web owners to date, they have realized that user engagement is more crucial for the website and business’s success.
What is the use of visitors visiting your site who tend to leave within a few seconds? They may never return to your site since they didn’t find anything worth engaging, which would motivate them to spend more time or to come back. The primary purpose of a website to convert a visitor to a loyal customer remains unfulfilled.
Understanding Website User Engagement
Web owners try all sorts of ways to create a successful website. To achieve the same, they need to build a website considering the factors that affect user engagement.
Since there is a tough competition, all site owners try their best to engage users to improve their site success and ranks. Engaging visitors is also the foremost step that will later motivate them to know and buy your products. If visitors leave your site immediately after loading it, it may affect your bounce rate and site reputation.
In a nutshell, website user engagement is directly related to the time a user/visitor stays on your site. They should enjoy browsing your site. Even Google ranks sites taking into consideration the user engagement factor.
High User Engagement > High Rank > High Conversions > High Profits = Success
Customer Engagement Statistics indicate that:
- 86% of the buyers tend to pay more for a better customer experience.
- Successful engagement of customers affects the churn ratio by 63%.
- Successful engagement of customers helps achieve 50% higher productivity.
Attractive and relevant content, targeted keywords, images and videos, colourful designs and templates, social media likes all are various ways to increase user engagement.
Apart from this, there are some more tips to increase website user engagement. Let’s check them out.
Ways to Optimize Website User Engagement:
1. Install an SSL certificate on your Website:
The cyber-crime graph is always on the rise, and hence the need and demand for web securities are always high. Users prefer and love to navigate secured sites. One such digital security that they ensure before approaching a website is checking whether an SSL certificate is installed on the site. And wonder, how do they check whether the site has the same installed or not?
They check for its security indicators like HTTPS (Hyper-text Transfer Protocol Secure) in the address bar and a URL padlock. These indicators promise that the site is secured with encryption and data privacy will be maintained.
SSL certificates establish an encrypted connection between the browser and the server to secure the websites. Hence all the communication between both parties will be encrypted so hackers can’t misuse the information even if they gain access.
The plain text (Bob is working) gets converted to ciphertext (&56hje^%jkd), and the same can only be decrypted by the intended recipient having the related key.
A site not having an SSL certificate installed on the same will be termed “Not Secure” by Google. So, buy SSL certificate from cheapest SSL certificate provider.
2. Reduce Page Load Time:
It isn’t very pleasant to keep on waiting for the site pages to load or for the link to load. Visitors tend to exit such slow sites and move to other sites rather than wait. This affects the bounce ratio and the site reputation, which, in turn, ruins website user engagement.
Website Load Time Statistics indicate that:
- 1 in 4 visitors abandon sites that take more than 4 seconds to load.
- 1-second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
- The bounce rate rises to 38% for sites whose page load time is more than 5 seconds.
Limit the page load speed by reducing redirects, optimizing and limiting images, removing blocking Java Scripts, reducing server response time, etc.
The use of powerful speed optimization tools like GTmetrix, which gives a report on the website load time and helps compare site performance with other sites, improves user engagement.
3. Improve your Internal Linking Structure:
Good internal links help in connecting with Google and in organizing the structure of the website. They equalize links across the sites and maintain a hierarchy about the important and unimportant pages. An appropriate linking strategy helps boost SEO and lead to an increase in sales as customers are engaged and encouraged to add more products to the cart.
Tips on Internal links:
- Links should have expressive anchor texts
- Specific links having page relevance works wonders
Ensure that the links work error-free and lead you to other pages or content. Adding internal links enables search engines to easily crawl your site, leading to an increase in organic traffic.
4. Simplify Navigation:
When any user approaches a website, they expect an instant result of their searches. But if a user doesn’t find the product due to navigation issues, it may cause a massive loss as user engagement will cease, and the bounce rate will increase.
Navigation having many options, drop-down menus, weak categorization, unnecessary links, or indifference to text links are signs of bad navigation.
To increase user website engagement, focus on designing a simplified navigation process wherein your users can easily connect with your content. Intensify personalization by detecting their clicks and ensure that they get their information within three clicks at the most.
A simple and organized navigation menu or a search box for searching for information on the website is a good idea.
5. Use a Responsive Design:
Statistics indicate that mobile devices contribute to 50.81% of the global website traffic. Hence, rather than creating a site that fits only in one screen, it’s advisable to make it responsive to the smaller screen to gain better user engagement.
A mobile-friendly website where pages fit perfectly, small cursors to navigate through the site, and simple elements focusing on the website’s content are all it counts to engage users.
Tips to Conciliate both Desktop and Mobile Users:
- Ensure that the content remains the same on computers and mobiles
- Searching information on both screens is easy
- The button sizes for both screens for site navigations should be designed accurately
- Easy switch from desktop view to mobile view
- Go for big fonts for easy reading on small screens
Use mobile responsiveness test tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, which will tell you whether the site is mobile-friendly or not.
Improving user engagement is a key outcome of working with a top SEO agency. Find out more about this in our article on the benefits of choosing the best SEO agency.
Final Thoughts:
Website user engagement is a challenging task, but it comes with ample benefits. It would help if you focused on the site’s attractiveness, engaging factors, and responsiveness, including user-friendliness, to keep your users engaged with your website.
Apart from the above factors, researching the audience, giving discounts and attractive offers, captivating content, customer support number or a chatbox for query resolve, eliminating SEO errors, etc., all contribute to user engagement.
Utilize these multiple tips to engage your users and create them into loyal customers whose referrals and positive feedback will help you bloom your digital infrastructure.
