Approximately 500,000 websites are created every day, adding to more than 2 billion websites currently live as of this moment. That’s a staggering number! And in this vast pool of websites, if you’re worried about the engagement of yours, you’re not alone.
With so many websites out there, it is becoming more and more challenging for businesses to gather and take hold of their visitors’ short attention span 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 grow it in 2020?
Website Engagement
Website engagement generally means examining your website’s performance and analyzing how well it can gather users’ attention and propel them to take actions such as subscribing, availing customer service, or buying products or services. Simply put, better website engagement means increased brand awareness, better SEO, and greater conversion rates.
Website Engagement Metrics
So, in a competitive digital marketplace, how do you make sure your website performs better than 2 billion other websites? To know the answer to this question, you first need to understand website engagement metrics that will provide insight into how well your website performs. These metrics include:
- Pageviews: This metric gives you an insight into how many people visit your website per day.
- Time Spent On Page: This determines the amount of time a visitor spends on your website. The longer they spend time on your website, the more engaged they are.
- Pages Visited Per Session: This metric determines whether the visitor on the website visits other pages besides the homepage. The more pages the user visits during one session, the more engaged he/she is.
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate represents the percentage of your visitors that got on your site 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 degree to which your users are returning. The more the rate of returning visitors, the more engaged your website is
Now that you know what website engagement metrics are—let us dig into five simple ways to improve them.
Optimize Your Website’s Speed
Users in 2020, despite the increasing competition among billions of websites, have a shorter attention span than ever before. This makes it incredibly difficult for businesses to grab their attention and even more so with a slow website that takes hours to load. Long loading time is arguably the first thing that puts users off your website, increasing your bounce rate. To increase your website engagement, make sure your website doesn’t take longer than 2 seconds to load.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
As the use of mobile devices evolves, so do people’s buying habits. It has been estimated that mobile users generate more than half of website traffic (52%). This is a considerable number of people who surf the internet through their phones, yet many websites are not optimized for this. More than 93 percent of small businesses’ websites aren’t even responsive to mobile phones.
Moreover, mobile responsive websites not only help you hold on to your 53% of phone audience users, but it is also better for your SEO. As Google has stated multiple times that their crawler ranks websites better if they are mobile responsive.
Strengthen Your Internal Linking
A strong internal linking strategy is a solid plan for increasing your website engagement and helping search engine bots find pages on your site and index them. Internal links send a visitor from one page of the website to another, hence increasing the number of pages he/she visits per session. A simple way to form internal linking is by adding links in a related piece of content on your website. These links will direct the audience from one part of the website to another.
About Reach First
Reach First is an Edmonton based digital marketing agency offering state-of-the-art online marketing solutions to help businesses grow and reach their local and international customers. For more information on how to increase website engagement, visit our website or contact us today for personalized service.