11 Ways To Make Visitors Stay On Your Website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of many ways to market your website so that you get more traffic, more subscriptions for your email list and ultimately make more sales.
Good website SEO enables people who are searching for your topic to find it (using a search engine like Google Search or Bing), due to the content and information that you put on and off your website. It involves the titles of your articles, pages and blog posts, how you format your content and the number of high-quality backlinks to your website.
But sometimes in our quest to get SEO perfect for Google, we forget why we’re doing all this. The most important people are your audience. Everything you do should put them first. But thankfully, creating an amazing user experience is great for good SEO too.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
How To Engage Visitors On Your Website
1. Users First
Search engines are important, but users are everything. Users are your audience, the people you’re trying to help, and your bread and butter. Therefore, if any part of SEO seems wrong for your audience and you think it would bother them, don’t do it. But, test it out first to see what happens. You can always change things.
2. Make It Responsive
All websites today need to be responsive. This means that they are easy to view on all size screens from a desktop computer to a smartphone. One reason is that search engines prioritize these types of sites. The other reason is that users are more likely to use a mobile device to read the emails you send, which means they’re more likely to click through to your site via email on a mobile device.
3. Keep It Clear
You want the information on your website to be crystal clear. When someone comes to your site there should be no mistake about the point of your site, the reason you’re there, and what you offer. The best thing for keeping visitors on your website is to fill it with content that speaks directly to your users.
4. Content Is King
From your home page to your about page and the blog, the content on your website is extremely important. You need to publish relevant, targeted, customer-centric content on a regular basis. It’s this content that will increase website engagement and enhance your SEO.
5. Include a CTA
If you want content to do anything but entertain, you’ll need to always include a call to action (CTA). Some form of CTA should be on every page of your website. Whether it’s “Share”, “Sign up”, “Buy” or something else, tell your audience what to do next based on the page they’re on.
6. Rid Your Site of Clutter
You’ve probably accidentally clicked on a link that looked like a wonderful article full of great information, only to go to a website that’s flashing and cluttered with ads and links so badly that you couldn’t enjoy the content at all. This type of design and content harms your SEO and drastically reduces your user’s website attention span.
7. Increase Trust
Using your website, social media, and other content, it’s imperative to build trust with your audience. The best way to do that is to ensure that the content you use is accurate. If your audience experiences inaccuracies and problems, they’ll lose trust.
8. Benefits over Features
When you’re describing any products or services on your website, focus on what your audience or user wants to know and what’ in it for them. They don’t care about you. They care about how it benefits them. Focus on that.
9. Color Is More Important Than You Think
It’s tempting to design a website based on what you like. That can work if you’re an average member of your own audience but if you’re not, you really need to research your audience and understand something about color theory to get that part right.
10. Use Images Thoughtfully
The use of images is important, but you don’t clutter your website with too many because it will slow down your site. Plus be sure to include the alt-tag information too. This is the description you give to an image. Although search engines can’t ‘read’ images, they can read the descriptions that you give them. It’s also what your website visitor reads when they move their cursor over an image on your website.
11. Test Everything
The most awesome aspect of anything online is that you can always change it. If you try something and your users hate it because you get emails or see bad comments online, you can fix it and let them know. They’ll appreciate it and you’ll be a hero.
Free Tutorial: Create The SEO Strategy That Fits Your Business
When you focus on your users, you can’t go wrong. If the SEO you employed causes someone to click on a link and they don’t find what they expected to find (or something better), they’ll be disappointed and click away. When they bounce off your website, that is bad for SEO. Create value for your audience, and add the technical aspects of SEO, and both your audience and Google will stay on your website.
The key to getting your content to rank well in search is having a clear understanding of how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks your content. In this free SEO Tutorial from HubSpot you’ll learn how search engines rank your content, how to measure the state of your current SEO, and how to figure out an approach to SEO that fits with your business’s needs. This lesson includes a workbook that helps you evaluate the state of your SEO authority and identify specific areas for improvement so you can give your website a better chance of ranking.