If people are not interacting with your website, then what is the point of having one? The best way to increase revenue, sales, and overall business performance is to have a functional and interactive website. Here are the best ways to make sure that you are not only attracting an audience for your site, but also retaining and engaging that audience.
What is Audience Engagement?
In order to create a successful website, you will need to have people interacting with the site. Audience engagement includes metrics and data that show how people interacted with your site. For example, a person could easily land on your home page and immediately exit the website. If we want to increase engagement and interaction, we can brainstorm certain strategies that will encourage a user to interact with the website.
How to Increase Audience Engagement
Increase your site’s speed
If your site has a slow speed, users are unlikely to spend much time on the site. Most people will get impatient and exit the site. Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to use in order to track your site’s speed and overall responsiveness.
Improve Internal Linking
Internal linking is a great way to allow users to keep interacting with your site, even if they have not found the information that they are looking for. If a user is on your site, and finds a link to another page on your site, perhaps the page that they were originally looking for, this user is still interacting with your site.
Remove Technical Errors
It is important to make sure that your site does not have any technical issues, no matter how small they are. If a user comes across one of these errors, they are unlikely to continue to interact with this site, since they will probably assume that this site has technical issues.
Provide a Site Search Option
Most people go onto a website in order to find certain information. If a user can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave the site and continue to explore on another site. To make sure that users can find what they are looking for, it is important to provide a site search option somewhere on your site.
Improve your Site Design
There are always going to be ways that you can improve your site’s functionality. From time to time, it is important to evaluate how easy it is to find information on your site. By setting out to improve your site design, you can improve your site’s quality and performance.
What are the different ways to measure Audience Engagement?
There are many different ways that people can interact with your website. But how can you tell if people are interacting with your site? Here are some audience engagement metrics to keep an eye on:
Pageviews
In Google Analytics, under audience and overview, you are able to see how many users have viewed a page on your website. This accounts for multiple views from different users, so we are able to track if user engagement has increased or decreased within a certain time period.
Why it’s important: We can see if the content is easily accessible on the site. Is there a way to improve user experience? We might even introduce other tactics such as internal linking (read on for more information about this) in order to keep users on the site and view more content.
Bounce rate
Google Analytics also lets us track the bounce rate of a website, which is located underneath the audience and overview tab. Bounce rate gives us the percentage of users that visited the site, but then quickly exited the page. Essentially, this means that users choose not to interact with the site for whatever reason.
Why it’s important: It is important to track this percentage because it informs us if there is a problem with the site, or if we are appealing to the wrong audience.
Conversions
In Google Analytics, underneath the conversions tab, you are able to set up goals and track your progress towards completing these goals. In regards to audience engagement, there are certain goals that we can set up in order to track audience engagement. For example, someone might set a goal of wanting to have20 people sign up for their newsletter a month. Signing up for a newsletter is just one way that users can engage with the site.
Why it’s important: Conversions allow us to track this number and see how we are progressing towards a goal.
If you feel like you created a great website, but people just aren’t interacting with it like you hoped, let us know. Along with building a solid SEO foundation, we love improving sites so that users can better interact with your great content. Let’s get users engaged!
