5 Ways to Increase Website User Engagement
Website user engagement directly impacts your SEO, website traffic, online lead generation and consumer impressions of your brand.
Generating user engagement encompasses everything from your website’s content to adding motion to buttons to tell the users they’ve completed a task. That small response can be enough to keep users interested and exploring your website.
So what is website user engagement? Why does it matter? And what are the 5 ways to increase engagement on your website? Read on for more.
What Is Website User Engagement and Why Does it Matter?
Getting users to your website is just one step in the process. Then you need to keep them interested and engaging with your content.
The time that a website visitor spends on a page will be indicative of how engaged they are. Bounce rates also tell you something about your user engagement. If a user isn’t clicking on elements on the page or navigating to at least one other page during a visit, you either aren’t engaging them or attracted the wrong user.
Failing to engage your users by keeping them on your website for more than a few seconds and having a high bounce rate will impact your SEO. Many factors contribute to a high bounce rate, including attracting the wrong users, targeting irrelevant keywords that your content doesn’t deliver on, and a poor user experience.
Google looks at more than just keywords. The search engine also wants to see that you are delivering a great experience once users land on your website because that means your website met the user’s search intent. And Google wants to deliver the right content on the first try.
But user engagement is about more than SEO. If you can’t get users to stay on your website to learn about your company, you can’t get them to take the action you want. That means no sales or new prospects entering your sales funnel. Ultimately, your website is about sales and lead generation, so if it isn’t accomplishing these goals, it isn’t working for you.
5 Ways to Increase Website User Engagement
Increasing user engagement means adding interactive content to your website and ensuring that the content answers the visitor’s questions and delivers the content you promised it would.
The 5 ways to increase website user engagement are:
1. Condensed, targeted copy
2. Motion
3. Videos
4. Animation
5. Social proof
1. Condensed, Targeted Copy
The very foundation of your website is its content. You can have the most modern and sleek design but poor content and lack in user engagement. Your website content must do the following.
1. Show you understand your customer
2. Explain the problems your customer might be feeling
3. Display what life would look like with a solution to their problems
4. Present information on how you can help solve those problems
5. Avoid jargon and complicated language that might bog the user down
6. Make the content skimmable and consumable in small chunks
7. Offer simple FAQs to answer common questions and guide users toward the content they need
8. Create a smooth and easy to navigate customer experience so users can explore your content with ease
Before you write your first headline or paragraph, you need to understand your customers. Complete deep audience research to ensure that your copy is delivering what your customers need and matching their search intent.
2. Motion
Too much motion can be overwhelming for users. But the right amount of motion can be the small touch that helps guide users toward the content you want them to see while keeping them interested and engaged to stay on your website.
Motion can be as simple as a hover effect on a button or adding kinetic typography (also known as moving text). The key to motion is having just enough to intrigue the user’s eye without causing a jarring experience that makes them bounce.
Too much motion can lead to errors in loading your website content and making it difficult for the user to navigate the website. So realize that motion is about well-placed moments where you reassure users they are in the right place and viewing the right content.
3. Videos
Videos are powerful tools for increasing user engagement. Some users prefer to gather information by watching a short video instead of reading content. In fact, 66 percent of people report that they prefer video to other types of content.
Keeping a user on a webpage for a minute is simple when you have an informational video that provides crucial details and information to a user.
Website videos can be product demonstrations, brand overviews, customer testimonials and so much more. Video is impactful, emotional and can demonstrate the human side of your brand. It’s about more than just engaging website users but about bringing your product, service, customers and leadership to life in a way that written content cannot.
4. Animation
Light website animation can be enough to intrigue your website visitors and get them to engage with your content. It doesn’t take much to invite the user in, and just like motion, you need to use it with care because too much can lead to big issues, like slow load speeds.
Some ways to bring animation to life on your website are through gifs or JavaScript. Animation can help tell your story in brief demonstrations shorter than video content on your website or it can help tell users that they’ve accomplished what they came for.
For example, thinking about a quick product use demonstration that shows in 5 seconds how to use your product without audio that automatically plays when the page loads. Or think about the power of a scrolling bar that fills and tells a user that they’ve completed a form.
Animation can aid in showcasing who you are and why you matter and telling users that they’ve accomplished what they came to your website to do.
5. Social proof
Great website content can be impactful, but part of your content strategy has to be social proof, or evidence of your brand’s claims. This can be in the form of case studies, testimonials, product reviews or other types of user-generated content (UGC).
At some point, you must stop talking about yourself and how great you are and allow others to do it because it will mean far more when someone else says that you’re great.
Social proof provides consumer confidence that you deliver on your promises. It offers a balanced and honest view of your products and services in a way that you can’t talk about your own brand.
And it showcases to your website visitor that your product or service is for people like them. It’s that last nudge many users need to take the next step with a new brand.
At Design Positive, we help brands make new friends by engaging website visitors with strategic designs and positive user journeys, while doing it all in an access-to-all approach.
