5 Tips on How to Keep Users on Your Website
Keeping people on your website for as long as possible is something everyone who owns a website wrestles with. The longer people stay on your site, the more engaged they become, the more you can sell—whether it’s your services or web advertisements.
But how do you do it? How do you engage your visitors and entice them to click through more of your pages?
Getting 1,000,000 unique visitors a month will not matter that much if they are all leaving in droves as soon as they get to your homepage. Keeping that traffic on your website is just as important as getting them to your website in the first place. —SloDive
Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, tackles this very topic in one of his recent “Ask Gerber” videos on Inc.com. I found his points to be helpful, so I thought I’d share some of his tips, along with tips from others, in this blog post.
Embed Slideshows and Videos
Scott Gerber’s video on Inc.com was just under 3 minutes long, and I had to watch a 30 second CapitalOne commercial beforehand. After Gerber was done sharing his tips, Emerson Spartz, founder of Spartz Media, came on to share his own tips. I watched the whole thing. Sure, I thought the guys were talking WAY too fast, but I understand that they are trying to squeeze a lot of information into a short amount of time. No one wants to watch a really long video.
When I worked for Inc.com, one of the things I got to do was create slideshows to accompany some of the stories I wrote. These slideshows were added visual content that complimented my stories, and I thought they worked really well. It was a way for people to learn more about a topic in a different way—with out the hassle of all those annoying words…
Video can be used in so many ways that can be engaging to the user. It can be a way to showcase your product or service, learn about the company, meet the employees, get testimonials from customers, create training videos, how to videos, or video blogs. —StayOnSearch
Videos and slideshows should be kept short so you don’t lose the attention span of your viewer. But done right, videos and slideshows can keep people on your site for minutes longer than if they didn’t exist at all.
Break Up Content on Multiple Pages
Have a really long blog post? Put it on two pages! That way your visitors are looking at more pages on your site, boosting your ratings. The more pages people view on your site the more chances they get to engage with your brand and be enticed by advertisers.
Include Links to Complementary Content
Internal links back to your own cornerstone content will keep people on your site and reading your best material. —CopyBlogger
Use keywords to link back to other content on your site. My personal goal is to include at least three internal links for every blog post I write. Most of the time, it’s more. This not only keeps people on your site longer, it offers them additional information on a topic they are interested about.
Google likes internal linking on your site if the links go to related topics. It’s good to link to one or two other blog posts within your blog content, but only if it ‘makes sense’ within your post. This helps the search engine spiders to crawl your site easier, and most importantly, it will help to keep readers on your blog longer. —ProffitBlog
Format Your Writing
Think bullets, numbered lists, headers—all of these “tricks” will make it easier for viewers to read your content and find what they are interested in. If your site has a lot of content, Gerber suggests creating “Most Popular” and “Most Recent” lists for your site where you list a series of blog posts. Newspapers do this all the time. Whenever I go to NYTimes.com, I always check out their “Most E-Mailed” list of stories to see what other people have shared.
Encourage Interaction
If you make someone want to leave a comment or take a poll, you are getting them to interact with your site. The more people interact with you the longer they will stick around. —SloDive
When my company launched a dream wedding giveaway contest on our website, the engagement on our site skyrocketed. Part of the contest included public vote, and vote they did! Not only did people vote in droves, they kept coming back to our site to find out the results on what they voted on. Driving people to our contest on our website through Facebook and Twitter has helped, too.
These are just a few tips on how to keep people on your website longer. Do you have any ideas to share that have worked for you?
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by xilius.
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Thanks for the tips. I’ll try to use more videos in my site.
Nice Tips…..This could really be very useful. By the way the idea of including slideshows and video is really great. Thanks for amazing share.
Great tips.. I am gonna use it in my sites.. Thanks again..
My website’s got the same problem
and I’m starting to give up on it, have no idea what to do to keep people longer and engage them in any activity. But the article is great, good job!
What are examples of contests for sites? I would like to add more interactions to sites, but I am having a hard time with what would be appropriate. For example, what is a good way to engage for the web industry or for my client that is a professional nursing service? I am intrigued to find out how others are doing it.
Thanks for reminding me to step up my game with embedding videos and slideshows on my site. I simply have to find the time or just make the time. Great article.
Finding/making the time for videos is probably the biggest challenge for me, too. It might be easy to come up with a few ideas and do two or three videos all in the same day. If you are featuring yourself in the videos you could even change your outfit and hair to make it look like you filmed them on different days
Formatting your writing is a biggie. When I go to a site to read an article only to be greeted by poor font choices (color, size and style) and formatting, I either end up not reading the article or read it as fast as I can and get out. White space can make a difference.
Break that long post up into pages, huh?
You do realize that the majority of actual human beings trying to read your content hate that, right?
Man, you are giving terrible advice. Break up posts into multiple pages? You have to be kidding right?
I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this advice:
“Break Up Content on Multiple Pages”
This isn’t for users, this is for you; more specifically, this is a tactic for you to bleed more money from your advertisers.
split onto 2 pages –> 2 page loads –> 2 rounds of adverts –> twice the impressions
It’s a scumbag tactic, plain and simple.
Regarding the actual content…
If you feel the need to split up the article, then it’s possible you’ve made it wordier than it needs to be; perhaps because of flowery language to make it sound smarter than it needs to be.
I’m not saying “dumb it down”, but it’s a blog post, not a novel…lose the floaty chaucerian English and get to the point!
I have a better name for this article:
5 Things That Newspaper Sites Do That Users Hate
When I saw #2 I almost thought this was a joke post. The rest of the suggestions are great, but that one is evil evil evil. I get the premise that it can save bandwidth on mobile devices and speed up loading times, especially if you do long reviews, but if you really feel you must, then you need to offer a way of joining up all the pages.
Also not a bad shout is offering a sideshow-less list of content like Mashable does with theirs.
Nice ideas by using slideshows and videos!!! Thanks for giving tips:-)