Five Powerful Ways to Drive Engagement on Your Website

When running a website (whether a personal or business website), the main goals are usually lead generation, conversion, and sales. However, whatever leads your site manages to generate would translate to nothing without engagement. Thus, conversion and sales via the site would remain elusive.

The question is: why engagement?

One answer to that is ‘to beat competition’. No matter how small your niche is, you will always be faced with competition. Statistics show that there are over 966million websites online today, and they are all clamouring for attention. This brings us to the second reason engagement is paramount.

Considering the mantle of information online today and how easily accessible it is, the attention spans of internet users have become meagre and fleeting at best. This makes it essential that your website begins to engage your visitors as soon as they land on it. Otherwise, you risk losing them a few seconds afterwards.

How then can you drive engagement?

The answer is simple. Do everything you can to make your website useful, informative, compelling, user-friendly, and attention-grabbing. Here are five ways you can do that.

Make Your Website Speedy

Apart from the fact that page load speed is a major Google ranking factor, it can also affect your bounce rate. This is because no one wants to spend their precious time waiting for a slow site to load. The longer your site visitors have to wait idly for your pages to load, the more disengaged they would become. One survey discovered that nearly a half of web users will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Therefore, why not do yourself, your site, and your brand a favour and seek out and apply as many strategies for improving page load speed as possible? Some of them include choosing the right web hosting package, using a minimalistic design, optimising your images, and compressing your files using Gzip.

Make It Responsive

In this age when the majority of the world’s population carries a mobile device in their pocket wherever they go, in this age when smart TVs are becoming increasingly popular, it’s very important that your website is optimised for both mobile devices and high-resolution screens. Responsiveness means that your site is designed to format and display well on various devices. This makes it user-friendly on all platforms, making it easy for visitors to engage with your content.

If you don’t have the resources to hire a designer/programmer that can design your site to be responsive, you could go for a website-building package like the ones offered at freeparking. The great thing about these site builders is that they make your site automatically responsive, they are cheap, and you don’t need prior coding knowledge to use them.

Make Your Navigations User-Friendly

This means making your site easy to navigate. Users love it when they don’t have to work hard to discover what they are looking for on your site. Thus, navigations that are well-structured, simple, and easy to find can go a long way in keeping your visitors comfortably browsing through your pages and even encourage them to take action that results in sales.

Also, pay attention to proper integration of internal linking and use of calls-to-action.

Tailor Compelling Content

Typically, people visit websites in search of information. The problem is that information is everywhere online. Why should they digest yours? What makes yours stand out? When you don’t address these questions, you risk publishing unremarkable content on your site and thus driving your leads away.

Here are some things you can do to ensure your content is engaging:

• Be original. Don’t copy. Think out of the box. Always find an angle that hasn’t been explored.
• Make your content informative. Everything you write should count.
• Use evocative images in your posts.
• Catchy headlines are great.
• Use short paragraphs. They are easy on the eye.
• Backup your points with citations.
• Try various post formats–text, info-graphics, videos, how-to posts, and so on.
• Be humorous when you can.
• Tell a story and favour conflict.

Find out more on creating compelling content for your website here.

Always Interact with Your Audience

Engagement is all about communication and involvement. You can’t hope to engage your audience if you don’t interact with them. Don’t simply publish your post and then dust your hands. Read the comments your posts generate and reply to them when necessary.

People relish recognition. It’s that simple. And when you reply to comments on your site, not only are you letting your visitors know that you recognise them, you also engage them by answering their questions, offering further information, and acknowledging their contributions.

There are many other ways you can drive engagement on your website. Check this out. You can start with the five mentioned above and work your way to other tips across the internet. Do this and you will see your engagement and brand loyalty improve.