Fortunately, there are tricks you can use that will help keep visitors on your website engaged for longer. Here are six strategies that will ensure visitors spend more time on your website:
1 – Keep Your Content Focused And Concise
Keep it short and sweet. People don’t want to spend a lot of time reading to get to your core message. Instead, they want to get the answer to their problems as quickly as possible. Make it easy for them to find them, so they’ll stay a little bit longer on your website to look for more and even return in the future.
Focus on one topic per page, with the most important information at the top of each page. This can include an overview of how your service or product delivers solutions, ways they can experience the benefits in their daily lives, and testimonials from other people who’ve tried it already.
Use sub-headings to break up the content into smaller sections. This makes it easier for readers to scan and understand what you’re saying without having to read every line of text. Although reading less, this will keep visitors on your website for longer since they are not giving up and leaving when facing a text wall.
2 – Write Engaging And Relatable
Be a website people want to stay on and enjoy the pleasant atmosphere. You can achieve that by making your web content more relatable. Instead of using sophisticated jargon or waves of buzzwords, chat with your website visitors like you would to someone in real life. If your copy is too difficult to understand, your information won’t matter much because no one will get far enough through it to appreciate the details.
To keep visitors on your website, aim for an engaging and relatable writing style. This will help build trust between you and your visitors. Readers can relate more easily when they see content from someone with similar interests, life goals or past experiences as themselves. It also feels more genuine than something written too perfect, which can sometimes come across as too formal for comfort. They will stay if they like you.
3 – Make It Interactive
The more your visitors engage with your website, the longer they’ll stay. Increase engagement by using interactive elements like quick checks or FAQs, maybe even quizzes or polls, to increase time on site.
Strive to keep your content fresh and interesting by providing many different content formats, such as videos and infographics. You can also provide users with the option to comment or share your content. By taking the time to create an interactive user experience, you can ensure that your website content is interesting and engaging, increasing the so called “dwell time” on your website.
Finally, track analytics to understand how your audience interacts with your content and use that data to make improvements. The better each single content element performs in terms of interaction, the longer you will keep visitors on your website altogether.
4 – Use Visuals As A Guide
There’s a reason people are drawn to images — they help process information. This is especially true when you see a familiar image, as it helps you understand the text elements in split seconds. For example, if you see an image of a dog and read the capture, “This is my dog,” your brain automatically understands that this dog must belong to whoever wrote those words and that this article is about them and the dog.
While visuals are essential to any content marketing strategy, they are indispensable for increasing the time people stay on your website. Visuals should break up long texts, provide quick information and contribute to a consistent style throughout your website. Check out Canva for creating great visuals in minutes. (affiliate link)
So, use visuals effectively to keep visitors on your website:
- Make sure each visual is relevant to the text around it.
- Use consistent visual styles throughout your website.
- Format text elements around the visuals.
- Place sufficient visuals to offer a break from long walls of text.
5 – Choose Fonts That Are Easy To Read
People often choose fonts based on their flashy appearance rather than how easy they are to read online. And this will cost them page views.
Only use web-optimized fonts on your website. Avoid small font sizes, as they make it hard for people to read what’s on your website without squinting or straining their eyes unnecessarily. Also avoid overly ornate fonts as they are harder to read too. And think about different screen sizes, very big font sizes won’t work well on mobile devices! Finally, choose a font colour that offers enough contrast when reading on a screen in daylight.
In summary, to give a pleasant reading experience and to keep visitors on your website as long as possible:
- Only choose web-optimised fonts and colours.
- Use fonts and font sizes that complement the style of your website without compromising readability.
- For body text, choose a font that is simple and clear.
- For headlines, select a font that’s not too fancy or ornate but also isn’t boring and plain.
- Select font sizes that are not too small and not too big.
- Optmise fonts for different screens (responsiveness). Think of mobile devices!
If the fonts don’t work well, people will turn their backs on your website. So fonts are one of the most important factors to keep visitors on your website!
6 – Offer A Clear Navigation Structure
Another effective way to keep people on your website for longer is to provide a clear navigation structure. This allows users to easily find what they are looking for. By improving the user experience, website visitors will access various pages because they are willing to quickly look for more relevant content that meets their needs. They feel encouraged to explore your website, go deeper, and therefore will spend more time on your site altogether.
If you have a lot of content to offer, e.g. blog posts, consider a search function or a subnavigation with categories and keywords. This makes it even easier for users to discover more. Furthermore, providing a list of related results underneath each post can improve the user experience and invite them to read more by going from one page to the next.
With a clear navigation and search features, users can easily find more information they are interested in, resulting in increased page views.
How To Keep Visitors On Your Website – Conclusion
Ultimately, you want to ensure your website is easy to navigate through, read, and digest. It doesn’t matter if it’s an informational blog post or a page describing your services or products. If a website visitor leaves before they saw all of it, that’s an opportunity lost.
