You should employ several approaches and strategies to enhance user attendance on the website, including providing more articles and infographics, utilizing interactive features, and improving the website’s appearance.
In this article, we’ll share 8 methods you could employ to take your first steps toward improved website user engagement and increased engagement numbers.
What is Website User Engagement?
Website user engagement is a quantitative estimate of the interaction time spent by active individuals on your website’s pages, using them, and interacting with the clickable items on your website. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google considers user engagement as “resulting from the attention people give to what matters to them, the time spent with a focused web page or foreground application screen. ”
Another metric that can be located in GA4 is the Engaged Sessions metric. Google will consider a session ‘engaged’ provided the user stays on your site for over 10 seconds, makes a conversion, or interacts with more than one page.
Measures of a site or a blog’s user engagement are also commonly referred to as a set of KPIs, which are significant to monitor because they demonstrate how efficient your site and content are.
Please scroll down for a quick tutorial on measuring some of the user engagement metrics discussed in this post!
Other User Engagement Metrics
Google uses a very simple, official method to define users’ engagement, but some other parameters can help understand the level of interest in your site among its users.
To really get a good measure of how engaged users are with your website, keep an eye on:
- Average Engagement Time per Session—The time spent by the user on your website assists in identifying when the users interact, which pages get most of the interaction, which factor gets maximum engagement for the site, and more.
- Average Scroll Depth – Although this is an easy concept to overlook, ascertaining how deeply your users are scrolling through your web pages alludes to their level of interest in your site.
- Bounce Rate—Measure it to know how many users came to your site only to leave immediately. When it comes to Internet users, this is a very good sign of not only how interested a website is but also how well it responds to the users’ questions and keeps their attention. Nevertheless, the bounce rate is not, for some reason, included in standard GA4 reports, but it is possible to add it manually.
- Interactions and Conversions—The existence of click conversions set on a website makes these sources ideal for monitoring users’ activities. Click events, in the above context, refer to the number of clicks that a specific link or button was clicked by the users. Click events may include form submissions, outgoing link clicks, affiliate link clicks, add-to-cart clicks, play button presses on videos, etc.
Now that you are aware of the qualitative and quantitative measures that you can follow to monitor the users’ activity on your website, it is time to provide you the tips to enhance the aforementioned metrics!
Best Ways to Increase User Engagement
You’re ready to create a user engagement strategy to enhance your website. Let’s dive in.
1. Write Really Good Content
Creating great content is the first step in increasing traffic to your site and attracting viewers’ attention. You could do everything perfectly in terms of SEO and get people into your site through perfect optimization, but when you provide content that does not meet their expectations, they will not spend any more time there.
Make sure your content:
- Provides information and details which will ensure that it fully answers any questions the users will have regarding that topic
- It is written clearly without these mistakes
- It tends to make use of simple headings and lists to categorize ideas.
- Is kept up-to-date
Videos need no introduction. For more content writing tips, watch 10 Best SEO Copywriting Tips for Crafting Content that Converts.
2. Target the Right Audience
You don’t get up one morning, flip open your browser, and say, ‘I think I will write about this topic on my website!’ No, take some time to think about whether the topic will attract the kind of visitors you want on your site. You have to write about things that are very relevant to your product or service to stand a chance and not have someone just click the back button and leave without seeing another page of your website.
To better target the right audience for your content, you should still research your keywords and ensure that the search intent of the users searching for your focus keyword is right for it. Type your focus keyword on the search engine and scan through the results that appear when you search for it.
Appeal to your mind with the question, “What is this searcher searching for here?” It is possible to face a situation where all the top results are some sort of guide or a listicle; for instance, your searcher will not click on your link if it does not meet their expectations.
3. Make Sure Your Website is Fast & Error-Free
If the website’s speed is not up to the mark, the user will lose interest and quickly close the website or move on to another. Run different speed tests for desktop and mobile platforms to increase site speed if necessary.
Specifically, if your website is built on WordPress, you should read How to Check Website Speed in WordPress in 2 Minutes or Less.
The same can be said for errors. Morey and Sorenson explain that integrity requires acknowledging that mistakes cannot be blamed on external environmental conditions and making a concerted effort to correct them. Getting your facts wrong does not help the user in any way whatsoever, and if there are errors on your site, your users are much more likely to leave!
4. Gather Feedback
It is one of the strategies that people sometimes overlook when designing for Website user engagement. In addition, the last piece of advice that we could give about the current state of users’ needs about your website is to ask them.
UserFeedback allows you to create a survey or get general feedback—limitless possibilities. Simply ask your visitors. I urge you to ask them any questions you wish, which will help to enhance your Website and the content you post and boost users’ interest.
For example, ask:
- That is what the users of your blog would love to read about
- If your pricing is unclear
- I would like to propose a conclusion based on the given facts: If there is anything you could do to improve your website
- It helps to think about how your users would rate the content that your website is displaying to them.
5. Add Exit-Intent Popups
When a user clicks the back button or navigates away from your site, there’s one really cool way to turn that quick exit into an engagement pop-up. Pop-ups refer to exit intent.
They are pop-ups meant to remain open with a message that would make the visitor choose to convert rather than depart. If you own an eCommerce website, you could provide a coupon redeemable from the online store. This is a good way if you are running a blog—prepare a bright and inviting design to ask the user for their email or a guide.
6. Add Live Chat
If a user fails or is lost while searching for information on your website or perhaps has other questions that they want answered, having that quick solution right at the corner of the website to attend to that user immediately can substantially boost the interaction.
Although we mentioned the most beloved live chat plugin above, it is called LiveChat. With its help, you can engage users who have decided to leave.
I believe that LiveChat is particularly good for lead generation. You can display client issues and opportunities by leveraging the diverse selection of reports. You can also listen to the average number of chats held and how long each chat took, as well as the number of customers waiting in queue and the response time of agents.
7. Add Related Internal Links and Popular Posts
Since you now want your visitors to turn to another page, ensure that you link to another webpage. If you provide logical links to other content, the men and women who utilize your site will undoubtedly be much more likely to become active users.
Therefore, it should go without saying to include links that lead to other pages on your website anywhere you can! However, you do not want to go overboard so much to an extent where the content looks haphazard and illegible.
That is why it is also quite effective to include post lists like popular posts, as they allow visitors to be introduced to the most read posts and engage them into clicking.
8. Add Videos to Your Pages
Other nice approaches that can enhance user interest in the site and favor SEO include sidebars, anchor badges, and incorporating videos on the web pages. Not only do videos entice your viewers to stay longer on your site and be more involved with it, but they can also be placed and possibly rank higher in the search engine results and earn you a better ranking in SERPs.
That is our list of tips for enhancing site visitors’ engagement, so stay tuned and warm! We expect you will also like some of the tips described above to improve your business.