About 500,000 websites are created every day, meaning there are currently more than 2 billion websites active. That’s a staggering number! And if you’re worried about your engagement in this vast pool of sites, you’re not alone.
Because there are so many websites, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to capture and leverage their visitors’ short attention spans to increase their leads and conversion rates, or in other words, improve their website engagement. But what exactly is website engagement and how can you increase it in 2020?
Website engagement
Website engagement generally means examining your website’s performance and analyzing how well it can capture users’ attention and prompt them to take actions such as subscribing, receiving customer service, or purchasing products or services. Simply put, better website engagement means higher brand awareness, better SEO, and higher conversion rates.
Website engagement metrics
So, in a competitive digital market, how do you ensure your website performs better than 2 billion other websites? To know the answer to this question, you must first understand the website engagement metrics that indicate how well your website is performing. These metrics include:
- Page views: This metric tells you how many people visit your website per day.
- Time spent on site: This determines the time a visitor spends on your website. The more time they spend on your website, the more engaged they are.
- Pages visited per session: This metric determines whether the website visitor visits other pages besides the homepage. The more pages the user visits during a session, the more engaged they are.
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate represents the percentage of your visitors who came to your website but immediately left without going anywhere else on your website: the lower the bounce rate, the better.
- New vs. Returning Visitors: This metric defines the level of return of your users. The higher the rate of returning visitors, the more engaged your website is
Now that you know what website engagement metrics are, let’s look at five easy ways to improve them.
Optimize your website speed
User attention spans in 2020 are shorter than ever, despite increasing competition among billions of websites. This makes it incredibly difficult for companies to get their attention, and even more so when a website is slow and takes hours to load. A long loading time is probably the first thing that turns users away from your website and increases your bounce rate. To increase your website engagement, make sure your website takes no longer than 2 seconds to load.
Make your website mobile friendly
As the use of mobile devices continues to evolve, people’s purchasing habits are also changing. It is estimated that mobile users generate more than half of website traffic (52%). This is a significant number of people surfing the Internet on their mobile phones, but many websites are not optimized for this. More than 93 percent of small business websites are not even mobile responsive.
Additionally, mobile responsive websites not only help you maintain your 53% share of phone audience users but are also better for your SEO. As Google has explained many times, its crawler ranks websites better if they are mobile responsive.
Strengthen your internal linking
A strong internal linking strategy is a solid plan to increase your site’s engagement and help search engine bots find and index pages on your site. Internal links direct a visitor from one page of the website to another, increasing the number of pages they visit per session. An easy way to create internal linking is to add links to related content on your website. These links direct the audience from one part of the website to another.
About Reach First
Reach First is an Edmonton-based digital marketing agency that offers cutting-edge online marketing solutions to help businesses grow and reach their local and international customers. For more information on increasing website engagement, visit our website or contact us today for a personalized service.