Getting visitors to your website is one thing, getting them to stay is something else. You can have a website full of great content, but if people don’t stay long enough to see it, it’s worthless.
Obviously the longer you can keep people on your website, the greater chance you have to make money from them. So what can you do to make visitors stick around?
How to keep people on your website
1. Reduce Frustrations
Among the reasons that visitors leave your website, removing frustrations is one of the easiest to fix (as a general rule).
Small frustrations can have a big impact on your bottom line, causing loss of trust & loss of sales.
Common causes of frustration:
- Slow loading website
- Outdated information
- Non-mobile friendly websites
- Website errors, broken links, missing images, coding errors
- Lengthy contact or registration forms
- Hard to find information
- Adverts/overlays
Problems such as broken links, missing images or a non-mobile friendly website are common, but totally avoidable.
Related Article: Does Your Small Business Have a Website? More Than 50% Don’t!
Removing these frustrations won’t guarantee any success on your website, but it is worth the effort to keep visitors browsing your site.
2. Add Videos
Once you have removed the frustrations that cause people to leave your website, you can start to focus on content that makes them want to stick around.
Video is becoming increasingly popular in place, or alongside written content. It is far more engaging & gets your points across without the need to read streams of text.
Video is fast growing in content creation & thousands of brands are enjoying the benefits.
Ways to utilize video content:
- Embed other videos. You don’t need any expensive equipment to add videos to your website. As long as you give proper attribution, most video creators will allow you to share their video on your website.
- Pay a professional actor on Fiverr. Popular micro-jobs site Fiverr is a great place to find experienced and affordable actors, voice over artists and video editors.
- Create your own. Creating your own videos isn’t reserved for big budget studios, you can make professional looking videos with a web cam or home video equipment.
Not only is video more engaging, it promotes trust & helps to put across your personality.
Types of video content to create:
- Product demonstration
- Behind the scenes of your business
- Video testimonials
- Tutorials/how to
3. Include more links
When browsing the web, people want to follow links, they should know where to go without having to look too hard for it. If they can’t follow a link, most people would rather go back & search again to find what they want.
Make it easy for visitors to browse all content on your website by placing plenty of links.
Place links on your images & always include a call to action on each page.
4. Provide value or an incentive
If your website isn’t benefiting your visitors, what reason so they have to stay?
People want to see soon after loading your website, how it’s going to benefit them. If your site doesn’t appear to offer any value within a short space of time, visitors will quickly leave for another site that does.
You can give perceived value in a number of ways:
- A how to guide
- Explaining the benefits of your product/business
- An offer, discount voucher, free delivery
- A productivity tool/App
- eBook
Anything you can give of value is worth adding. It doesn’t have to cost you much, people even find free information enough of an incentive to stay on your website
5. Exit intent pop-ups
Now the thought of pop-ups can conjure up thoughts of frustration for most people, but the truth is they’ve come a long way since the 90s and early 2000’s.
Exit intent popups take effect when a user appears to be leaving the web page.
Exit intent popups can be used to:
- Direct users to other content
- Collect emails
- Save a sale from an abandoned shopping cart
Modern popups can be controlled in a number of ways to reduce frustration, cookies can be used to limit how often they are shown, they can appear on specific pages only.
Does your site have a high bounce rate? Do people leave soon after visiting your website? Try these suggestions to keep your prospects on your site longer & make those all-important sales!
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