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5 Tips to Keeping Visitors on Your Website Longer


how to keep people on your website

When we need something today, we turn to our mobile device or computer and head to Google. Then we browse around the results pages to see what we can learn or discover about whatever it is we need or want at the moment.

From a marketing perspective, we are trying to get noticed by our potential customers and hoping we come up high in the right search engine queries. We hope people visit our website, like what they see, and then order something or give us a call.

How do we get more action from our website?

Knowing what we know about how people search and use the Internet, what can we do to increase the chances of the right kind of people finding us when they are looking for what we offer?

With the rapid-fire clicking-searching-clicking-searching world we are in today, people are moving faster and spending less time on the websites they visit. This means we have to focus on getting people’s attention and giving them easy ways to learn more. And we need to help them do this quickly!

An Important Website Metric that Goes Overlooked: Visit Duration

If we help people find and visit our website, and then find information that is both interesting and gives them what they need, this will lead to a favorable opinion and, in turn, more opportunities to make sales.

One way to measure this is to watch visit duration, which is the length of time that visitors stay on your website. If they are staying longer, and this measurement is increasing over time, then your leads and sales opportunities will also increase.

Here are 5 strategies to help increase session duration on your website:

  1. Create a Simple, Eye-Grabbing Website Design

  2. Add Video

  3. Add Engaging – High-Quality Images

  4. Update Your Blog with Relevant Content

  5. Utilize Internal Linking

Create a Simple, Eye-Grabbing Website Design

First impressions matter, even if people have already visited your website. Each time people pull up a website or visit any page, we have to grab their attention. Such is the cold reality of people searching the web.

Use attractive graphics and colors along with easy-to-read fonts that are large enough to be readable.

Make website easy to navigate, attractive and geared towards people looking for what they need. They are looking for something that will catch their attention and meet their needs. Give them something dramatic and eye-catching that makes them stop and think for a second.

Add Video

People surfing the web hate to read text. That’s why video works so well. But it has to be short and interesting. Like under a minute.

Visitors are getting a lot of other information and making snap decisions about you and your organization from videos they watch. And the impression your video makes is far larger than just the information in the video.

90% of users rely on product videos to help in decision-making process. So, use videos for product demos. Also, for introducing your organization, customer testimonials, on-boarding guides and industry updates.

Add Engaging, High-Quality Images

Images speak 1,000 words. Since we already know that people don’t read, use engaging, high-quality images to stuff your message into the heads of your visitors, quickly. Or, to pique curiosity. Be creative with your images.

Be sure to use images that you are allowed to use. Either your own images, images you have purchased or those that are licensed to you. Here’s another source of high-quality images and tools to create powerful, custom graphics.

Update Your Blog with Relevant Content

You blog is a powerful tool to give your visitors what can be viewed as informal, topical information.

Be sure to write about topics that are receiving the most attention and visitors. Refer to your Google Analytics to see what is of most interest to your visitors.

Use Internal Linking

Internal links are not used enough.

What are internal links? These are the links on one of your web pages that links to another one of your website pages. Using internal links helps people move smoothly around a website, following what interests them most, using this very basic, yet absolutely transformational tool, the hyperlink.

When you mention something on your website or blog, link to something relevant elsewhere on your website (or blog) as a way of adding to, or slightly changing, the subject at hand. This is a way to give visitors more access to information, and a way to find it easily, when they are thinking about it.

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