Whether you run a website for business purposes or as a side hustle, keeping your customers engaged when they’re on it is essential. To help with traffic to your website, the search engines need to be crawling your site and find excellence in every corner.
The more improvements that are made to a website, the more traffic will be pushed toward it. For businesses, keeping your customers engaged will help them eventually buy something or come back later to shop again.
With that in mind, if you want to improve your website’s engagement this year, here are some tips that will help draw in customers regularly.
Use a more conversational tone of voice.
The tone of voice is a big one for all businesses because it’s used to engage customers and connect with them personally hopefully. Depending on your business type, that tone of voice will be relative to how formal or informal customer interactions have to be.
For example, certain businesses like law firms need to be more formal in tone, whereas a creative company like a website design agency can be more informal.
Regardless, the tone of voice should be conversational when it comes to improving the website’s engagement. Despite what type of formal or informal voice is used, making it conversational will hook your customers in.
Imagine you’re having a conversation between you and the customer in person. Try to create copy to make those customers feel seen and want to engage with everything you have on your site.
Keep your content readable with the right structure
A website’s content is very important and needs to be worked on constantly to help stay relevant to the rest of the content online. When a user hops onto your site for the first time, it might be through one of your blog posts rather than a product page.
With a blog post, your content needs to be readable and have the proper structure so the user doesn’t get too bored and clicks off. When it comes to structuring, think about your sentence length.
Try to keep sentence length short as much as possible, and the same goes for your paragraphs. Shorter paragraphs make it easier to skim read, which many people do nowadays. Not only that, it will keep the user engaged for longer.
If a user sees just a big block of text, they’ll read the first two sentences and then get bored or distracted.
Get creative with images and video content
Talking of content, creativity is essential when it comes to ensuring your website stands out from the crowd. With millions of websites in existence nowadays, the competition is fierce, and it’s good to try anything new and trending to improve your website’s appearance.
Images and video content will always perform well on web pages because humans love visual content. It’s a lot better than having a page full of text that’s clumped together. Don’t be afraid to get creative with the media, from your product landing pages to the blog pages.
Many businesses online are getting creative with their product pages in particular. For example, why not do 360-degree views of the product or have a how-to video on how to use the product as an extra addition to the page?
Add an online chat service
Customers want to feel seen, and when it comes to your site, they may have questions that they want to be answered quickly. Sometimes, there may be the option to contact your business via social media, but for the most part, it’s often through email and phone. However, these two methods aren’t always the quickest and most effective options.
More businesses are adopting an online chat service to help engage with customers and answer any pressing questions that might be stopping them from checking out with a product or service.
If your users on the site are often contacting the business via email or phone, it might be worth the investment to add a live chat feature. With this, you could incorporate some frequently asked questions to see if they can’t have their question answered before being connected with a sales agent.
It’s straightforward to add this feature when looking at how to add online chat to your website. It’s a valuable investment that will provide plenty of returns in sales for your business, so get it!
Show off customer reviews and testimonials
Some customers may take a little more convincing to part with their money, especially when encountering a business for the first time, where that can be aided through customer reviews and testimonials. It’s well worth reaching out to existing customers and asking them to throw in their own two cents about their experiences.
Whether these are good, bad, or neutral, it’s essential to be transparent with your customers and showcase various good and not-so-good reviews. You could use the not-so-good reviews as an opportunity to show what you’ve done to improve this experience in the future.
Be proud of showing off achievements that have been made within the business via your website, and you’ll find that more new users will likely be willing to part with their money as a result.
Provide suggested items or recommendations feature
For businesses selling products online, customers may only buy so many items depending on whether they intended to visit the website. Some users may be tempted to stretch their intended budget if they were to come across something relevant to them.
A great way of improving engagement with your users online is to offer a suggested items or recommendations feature. This is great for those trying to upsell products or services that seem relevant to the shopper’s behavior.
Link internally to keep them on the site
With so many websites in existence on the internet, it’s hard to remain relevant. A lot has changed online in the past decade or so, which means your own website has to step up its game to keep relevant.
Optimizing the site is essential, especially when it comes to SEO. There are a lot of best practices to use when improving your site’s SEO; however, at the bare minimum, you should be using internal links.
Internal links are links from your site that you’ve placed in the current pages or content you’re creating and are due to publish. Every webpage should have at least one internal link if not two or three. It’s essential to keep the links relevant and not make it look as if you’re just stuffing them in for the sake of it.
Streamline your site’s navigation
Navigation is a big player when it comes to keeping customers engaged. That said, it’s important to look at how your site is laid out and how easy it is for a user to navigate it without it being too fussy or complicated.
Can the user find their way to all web pages easily or are some a little more difficult to find? Are all of your interactive buttons working, or are some of them no longer responsive? Streamlining your site’s navigation and adding more simplicity will certainly work in your site’s favor for engagement.
Create a seamless checkout process
Talking of fuss-free experiences, your website’s checkout process is a significant influence on how well your sales perform as a business. Again, for those with a business as a website, the checkout process needs to be seamless.
The user must have very few problems getting their basket through the checkout. To help with this, keep it clean and fresh regarding the design of the checkout. Make it clear of all the relevant shipping costs and taxes at the start, rather than springing it on them near the very end.
It may be worth auditing your current checkout process to see if anything can be improved. Chances are, some improvements can be made to help more users get over the checkout line.
Optimize the site for mobile use
When it comes to your customers and keeping them engaged, your site must be optimized for mobile use. If it’s not optimized for mobile use, then it’ll undoubtedly be frustrating for your users to interact with.
It’s 2023 – your website needs to work and function correctly on all devices, so ensure your site has been optimized correctly for mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and desktops accordingly.
Keeping your customers engaged on your website takes work, but it can easily be achieved with effort and know-how. Use these tips to ensure your customers remain engaged on your website all year round and that your website is always overachieving.
