Steph Wells is the founder of Formidable Forms, a drag & drop form builder for WordPress that empowers freelancers to create form-based solutions.
Attracting a relevant audience to your website is very challenging, and the same goes for keeping your visitors engaged.
It’s of no use when people visit your website and leave immediately without exploring the information published.
To educate your target audience, you want the visitors to stay on your website for longer. Even if they end up leaving, you would want them to keep coming back to you to explore useful information.
This may be easier said than done, but it is possible by offering a seamless experience to people visiting your website.
The following are a few useful strategies that may help:
1. Know Your Audience
Consider this the prerequisite. To engage your visitors, it’s essential that you know about their needs and preferences.
These insights will help you publish information that aligns with the interests of your target audience and convey your message in a way that grabs their attention.
You need to know about the questions that your visitors seek answers to and the challenges they face to facilitate their access to useful information or suggest viable solutions.
Knowing what your audience wants helps you get more eyeballs and makes it easier for you to make your visitors spend more time on your website.
2. Create Engaging Content
The key to ensuring high engagement is publishing engaging content on your website. This means your content should offer value and have a strong visual appeal.
You should tailor your content to align with the goals of the intended audience. It should cater to the concerns of your visitors and offer viable solutions.
The information published on your website should be easy to understand. So, it’s best to use simple words.
You should also consider making your website visually appealing by leveraging infographics, images, and videos.
Visual content is more eye-catching and helps you foster higher engagement compared to just presenting information through text.
3. Improve Your Website Design
Your website design plays a key role in helping you drive more engagement. You can’t expect your visitors to stay on your website if you offer them a clunky user experience.
You need to ensure that your website is compatible with different screen sizes and has a user-friendly interface.
People may have diverse preferences. Not all will access your website through their desktops. In fact, most of them will likely explore the content published on your platform through a mobile device.
So, it’s best to design an adaptive platform that ensures hitch-free information sharing on different screen sizes.
Furthermore, your website should have a clean and organized layout, making it easier for visitors to navigate and access the required information.
4. Ensure Information Accessibility
To increase the number of returning visitors to your website and boost engagement, you need to consider improving information accessibility.
Not everyone can access the information published on your website easily. Some of them may be disabled and face challenges while trying to explore your content.
You can improve information accessibility by leveraging alternative text, optimizing color contrast, adding video captions, using descriptive link texts, and structuring your content better with subheadings, bullet points, or numbered lists.
This makes your website easy to navigate for all your potential visitors and earns you the respect of your audience.
5. Optimize Website Structure
Improving your website’s structure not only helps you engage your visitors but it also enables you to grow your search engine presence.
A well-defined structure makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl your pages and index them swiftly. This helps you climb the SERPs quicker compared to the competing websites in your respective industry.
The core objective here is to help your current and potential visitors find useful information published on your website.
To optimize your website structure, focus on having simple menus and avoid giving too many options. Come up with well-thought-out labels for the menu items and group them logically.
You can leverage drop-down menus to organize information, but it’s best to use them in moderation. You would not want to end up confusing your visitors.
You should also carefully design your internal linking structure, keeping relevance and information accessibility in mind.
6. Reduce Load Time
The load time of your website is one of the critical challenges you may face when it comes to engaging your target audience.
People expect your website to load within a few seconds and leave immediately if it fails to do so.
There may be a number of things causing your website to load slowly, such as excessive use of media files, unclean code, CDN absence, unnecessary plugin integrations, poor hosting service, and so on.
These factors significantly affect the user experience you offer through your platform and your ability to engage your visitors.
To improve your load time, it’s best to identify the causes of the problem and devise viable solutions.
Optimizing your images, using website caching, leveraging a content delivery network, removing unwanted plugins, and switching to a reliable hosting service often help fix the problem.
You may also want to consider inspecting your website’s code and trying to simplify it so it’s not unnecessarily heavy and ends up affecting the user experience.
Final Words
There you have it: six effective strategies to keep your visitors engaged and coming back to your website for more.
Improving the user experience is the key and helps you foster high engagement. You should ensure that the information published on your platform is highly relevant, easy to understand, and accessible without a hitch.
If you want to generate more traction and keep your visitors hooked, working on the areas highlighted in this article may help.