When creating a new website, you should consider user engagement and user experience.
What does that mean?
When visitors visit your site, you want them to read the content from top to bottom, and take the required action.
Would you like to spend your hard-earned money on a site with low user engagement?
Of course not!
So, how can you improve the user experience on your website? What strategies work? Read on to get detailed information on the topic. Here are a few tips that can help to improve user experience on your website.
Design a Killer Content Strategy
Remember that your audience is located in remote locations. So, you can’t visit their home and market your product. Content is the medium between you and your audience. Create high-quality, engaging and unique content, which gives value to your customers.
Remember, your content is your voice. Make sure you do comprehensive research, provide solutions to customers’ problems. Nobody cares how many words you have written. What they care about is whether it’s helping them solve their problem. So, when creating your blog posts, you need to keep both the audience and search engines in mind.
Use clear headlines and subheadings, which provide your audience with what they’re looking for. Don’t forget to add the relevant images.
According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images.
Additionally, follow a style guide. If you use different heading fonts and sizes in different posts, your audience will be confused and won’t be happy.
Read Also: 7 Web Design Tips You Should Know Before Launch Your Website
Social Share Buttons to improve user experience
What do you do when you like a post?
Well, I share it on my social media platforms—Facebook and Twitter. I want others to get access to good information and grow in the digital marketing field. This is also what most of your customers do.
A majority of people function with the same mindset. They like sharing. So, add social share buttons in all your blog posts.
Jeff Bullas provides lots of options for visitors to share the content. This helps to improve user experience and user engagement across the website.
Ask For Email Addresses
You create a post, which gets visitors. Would you like to stay connected with them? Would you like them to know about new posts, latest offers, deals, and discounts?
If so, start collecting their email addresses. This is a great way to communicate with your subscribers and drive them back to your site to increase engagement. Email marketing is a very successful tactic for propagating your online business.
You can either add a subscription form at the end of each post or use a pop-up asking customers for their email address. Giving them freebies like e-books, whitepapers or a special discount can lure them in to subscribe eventually.
Interact With Your Visitors
Value your visitors. They spend time on your site, so make sure you serve them the best way you can.
If you’re creating killer content, it will get more comments. Try responding to every comment your readers leave on your posts. People like to be recognized. If you interact with your visitors, they will follow you and share your posts, which automatically increase your site engagement.
Always ask two or three questions when ending your blog post, allowing visitors to share their experiences and thoughts about the topics discussed. This initiates a conversation that you would want to have with them.
Additionally, keep your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page updated by adding relevant questions to it. This demonstrates your willingness to help your audience while aiding it with an important SEO component.
Read Also: 10 Web Design Tips To Boost Your Website Conversion
Don’t Ignore Internal Linking
Internal linking is important for both humans and machines. It helps visitors navigate your site more easily and helps you to improve user experience and user engagement.
For example, you’re writing a blog post on weight loss. There’s no harm linking it to your previous blog about a weight loss diet. Thus, your visitors will spend more time on your site, which will reduce the bounce rate.
Always do internal linking strategically. Point your visitors to relevant articles. It puts a negative impression when you send them to irrelevant articles or somewhere unexpected.
There’re many types of internal linking-
- Linking products to products
- product pages to category pages
- category pages to other categories
- blog content to categories and products
- blog content to blog content
If you find another post, which contains valuable information, don’t forget to add a hyperlink.
You can add a list of relevant articles at the bottom of each post. You can do so with plugins or manually. When a visitor finishes reading the post, chances are good that they will click on the links.
Readers gravitate towards top posts, newest posts and most commented on posts. So, consider adding these lists.
Optimize Site For Mobile Users
You want to Google something. Would you like to open your laptop or search using your smartphone?
Like you, a majority of customers prefer the same—searching through mobile. This shows how important optimizing your site for mobile devices is.
The global mobile data traffic is expected to increase about sevenfold between 2017 and 2022.
Is your site is optimized for mobile users? Run Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to learn more.
When optimizing your website for mobile devices, always consider removing nonessential elements. These include ads, sidebars, and unnecessary graphics as they increase the length of the web page, making it difficult for visitors to access important information.
Additionally, make sure opt-in forms, contact forms and leave a comment sections are working properly. If these elements don’t work, visitors will eventually leave your site.
Read Also: 7 User Experience Tips For Your Ecommerce Site
Conclusion
We have covered many techniques to boost site engagement, thus improving the user experience for your online customers. Many of them are easy to implement but are often overlooked.
Posting high-quality, unique, and relevant content is always the first step to keep your visitors engaged. Use Quora and forums to learn the problems of your target audience and provide relevant solutions. Nothing scares visitors away than a website with low quality, irrelevant content.
Optimizing your site for mobile devices is another great factor to consider. Run Google’s mobile-friendly test, and get help on how to make your site easy to use and navigate for mobile users.
Adding social share buttons, answering to the visitors comments regularly, internal linking, and email marketing are some other ways to boost user engagement for your website.
In the end—your objective is to keep your visitors on the website long enough for them to make a purchase. Think from the visitor’s point of view and do everything you expect when you visit a site.
If you’re getting a problem in search engine ranking, hire a reputed Abbotsford marketing agency.
What techniques do you use for site engagement? What works better than others? Share with us in the comments section below.