We all know our businesses, products and services inside out but visitors to your website don’t necessarily have the advantage of this knowledge. If they cannot find what they are looking for quickly then they will move on and that certainly isn’t good for your business.

So, it’s vital you design your website from their viewpoint. Put yourself in their shoes and it will ensure you give your target audience what they want. Here are some key points to keep in mind as you consider the structure of your website and how you can encourage visitors to stay for longer.

Ensure Your Website Loads Quickly

One of the essential things you need to do to keep your visitors on your site longer is to reduce the time it takes for your site to load. The human attention span is short, we want instant satisfaction. Even a 2 second delay in page response can result in a reduction in conversions. There are many steps you can take to reduce the page loading times such as image compression, enabling caching, investing in better servers and use of a content delivery network. Your web developer can guide you further on these points.

Add A Call To Action

Readers tend to leave your site once they have found what they were looking for. With an appropriate call to action you can give them a reason to stay or communicate with you further. This could be by giving them an option to subscribe to your newsletter or by guiding them to more helpful content or a similar product or offer.

Use A Popup For Improved Conversions

Don’t let marketing opportunities pass you by, by adding a popup to your website you can prompt visitors to stay via a targeted campaign. This may be an offer such as a 10% discount or an invitation to chat with a support agent. This grabs a visitor’s attention straight away and has been proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase conversion rates.

Use Engaging Video Content

Adding visual content has been proven to grow revenue faster than other methods of marketing. Many of your visitors would rather watch a video than read text. You can use videos to create presentations or highlights of your content in easy to understand snippets. Video can also put across your personality and brand values.

Create Easy To Read Content

People rarely read your content word for word. Instead, they scan the page to pick out important information, words and phrases. If your content is made up of long paragraphs that are hard to consume quickly, your audience will move on. There are a few ways that you can improve this, by ensuring the font size is large enough to read easily without causing eye strain, by breaking up the content so sentences are short, by using bulleted lists or by creating subheadings, all make content more appealing to read.

Make It Easy To Navigate

Have you ever landed on a website and been unsure what to do next? Was the site too busy? Was there inadequate information? This impacts on the overall user experience and, more importantly, impacts on how visitors see your brand. Have a clear structure to your site so users know what to do from the moment they arrive until they want to leave or contact you.

In conclusion, we hope these points give you some insights on how to keep your visitors on your site for longer. With a bit of due diligence and by following these best practices, you can engage those abandoning visitors and convert them into customers. Ask your current customers what you are missing and continue to improve and evolve your website. If you always seek to put the customer first, they will turn to you over your competitors.