Wait, Don’t Go!: 5 Ways to Entice Visitors to Spend More Time on Your Website

Brief encounters may work for speed dating. But when you’re trying to connect with customers, you want new acquaintances and old friends alike to linger a while on your website.

Many companies mistakenly believe the magic is in page views alone. And you definitely want to draw as many visitors to your site as possible. But many marketers contend that how long visitors stick around on your site is equally – if not more – important.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to understand the logic behind that thinking: the amount of time a visitor spends on a page indicates whether that user is actually engaged with your content. And, the higher the average time a visitor spends on a page, the more engaged your audience is.

Which is why, as website manager Jetpack put it, “As more interactive pages and web applications evolve into reactive site designs, the time on page metric might become even more important than measuring the total number of page views.”

With that in mind, Creative Boom and Australian web designers and marketing experts Bold offer some practical, and easy to follow tips for getting visitors to stick around your website longer:

1. Make it Pretty. That may sound superficial, and it is. But if your website is messy and disorganized or lacks arresting photos and clean graphics, visitors will be repelled no matter how great your content is. And with all the reasonably priced web design pros around now, there is no excuse for trying to patch something together.
2. Get to the Point. You want visitors to stay, but not because they’re trying to figure out what it is your company does, or why you do it differently or better than everyone else. Fact is, visitors won’t hang around to puzzle that out. So, state your mission, what makes you best in your field, and your call to action clearly and right up front.
3. Update Often. Nothing telegraphs a company that has lost its way faster than a website with obviously outdated content. What’s more, when Google is ranking your website, fresh content is an important component of SEO rankings.
4. Optimize Mobile-Device Viewing. More than half of all website viewing is now done on a mobile device. So, if mobile visitors to your site encounter hard-to-read font sizes, difficult navigation or trouble scrolling, they’re likely to give up on you quickly.
5. Simplify Navigation. Compiling and hosting a lot of content is great. But don’t expect visitors to devote much time to searching for it. To make their search easier, Bold recommends using “a breadcrumb-style navigation structure that involves hierarchically organized category pages.” Then, include only links to categories on the home page. Those links then can lead visitors to the pages of related content.

Contact us if you need help creating or revising a website that attracts visitors and invites them to stay.