10 simple steps to engage your audience on the website

Keeping a visitor’s attention who lands on your website through Google or other digital platforms is an important factor deciding your digital marketing campaign’s success. We digital marketers, call it as “User Engagement”.

User engagement involves any potential action taken on a website by a user instead of exiting the webpage immediately after visiting it.

Here are the effective ways to engage visitors and audiences on your website.

1. Understand your audience needs

Sharing helpful, informative content on your website is necessary to build people’s trust and engage them. But many bloggers do not get the results they expect because they do not have an idea what the audience is looking for.

Identifying what most people search on the internet is the best thing to engage them. You can do it with a tool called Google Keyword Planner. It is a free Google Ads tool that shows Keyword ideas, competition and other related data on a particular keyword.

1. Login to Google Keyword Planner tool with your Gmail Id.
2. Now enter the keyword relevant to your niche. I have entered “kids toys” for example and click search button. Now you get results as follows:

It displays Average monthly searches, Competition along with the keywords related to the query we have entered.

Keywords that have the highest number of Average monthly searches are the ones searched by many people.

Write a blog post based on those keywords.

It ensures you to give information on what exactly the audience wants.

2. Make your site easy to navigate

A complicated website design makes the audience difficult to access a web page. It makes them frustrated and confused.

Keep your website consistent. Divide categories, subcategories and provide appropriate tags with clickable links. It optimizes ease of access and even a new internet user can find what they want from your site.

3. Speed up your Website

Website speed (or) Page Loading time is an important user engagement metrics as well as Google Ranking.

Most of the internet users do not have the patience to wait longer for a website to load. People prefer websites that open quickly after they click the link. Digital Marketers say websites that take less than 3 seconds to load are getting higher engagement rates. Make your website load as fast as possible and assure its low loading time in mobile devices also.

Use Google Pagespeed Insights to access your website’s loading time. It suggests your website aspects you should enhance to speed up the website.

4. Integrate a Chatbox to the Home page

Chatbox in Home page helps a visitor to get answers for their questions instantly. Such automated chatbox scripts added offer personalized treatment and the visitors feel satisfied.

Note: Adding a small-sized photo and name in the chatbot makes the person believe that he/she is talking to a real person.

When there is nobody to track or handle the chat, mention it in the chatbox like “Hi we are not around now, but we’d love to chat another time. Please enter your queries now. Thank you!!.

5. Create informative, useful contents

The length and how you present a blog post matter to engage the audience.

Posting 6 ordinary blog entries a week will not be effective as sharing an informative, good looking, lengthy article per week.

Adding multimedia aspects like images or infographics, videos also grab the audience’s attention and derive better user engagement.

6. Invite comments

Comment section is the best place to get interact with the audience. As it helps the visitors to express their thoughts on your articles, it also helps you to identify what your audience expects from you.

The simple way to encourage people to comment is by concluding your article with an invite note like “Share your opinion in the comment box”.

Your response to the audience’s comments makes them feel like they have contributed to the blog entry. It boosts them to revisit your blog that accelerates the engagement rate.

7. Suggest Related Posts

You might see the recommended videos section on Youtube once the current playing video is finished. Those suggested videos include other videos of the particular channel or related videos published by another channel. It induces our interest to watch them too. Right?

The same applies to blog entries as well. Suggesting similar posts or posts belong to the same category at the end of a blog post helps the audience to stay a while on your website. Meanwhile, it increases a blog post’s visibility also.

On the other hand, you can give a link to another relevant blog post with an anchor text. Such interlinking possesses SEO benefits and helps to rank.

8. Add a prominent search box

If people difficult to find what they are looking for on your site, then they will exit your site and find it on other websites. So it is better to provide an on-site search option for visitors.

Web pages enabled with site search (search box) help the audience to find products or information quickly and easily.

9. Add Customer Feedback in Home Page

Allocating space for prominent customer reviews or video testimonials in the Home Page will heighten your brand in people’s minds.

The thin piece of customer feedback in their voice is social proof that showcases the quality of your products and services. The statements given by people in their own words on a company has the potential to engage and create trust among the visitors.

10. Conduct Polls, Surveys, Quizzes

People love to take part in online polls, quizzes, etc. Many renowned brands and successful companies like Amazon conduct the daily quiz in the name of FunZone. It keeps the audience’s attention and loves them to visit the site often which drives more traffic and gets new visitors.

Design online quizzes, survey or polls relevant to your business on your website. Ask people’s Email Ids to take part in the activity. (Now you can get a little more Email Ids).

Publishing the data or Results regularly keeps the engagement rate. It increases people’s trust in your brand and love to share the links.

Bottom Line

Driving more visitors to a website will remain neutral until the website impress or engage the audience. We are telling this because the longer a person stays on your website, it is a signal of you are gaining a new customer. Simply, more engagement means more conversion rate. Higher conversion means gaining people’s trust and increased sales.