Keep Website Visitors Lingering Longer

Have you wanted to keep those visitors on your website as long as you possibly can? If so, you are not alone.

The obvious reasons for keeping your visitors on your website longer will be to educate them on your products and services and then sell them on working with you. Believe it or not, the average time that a visitor stays on your website plays a significant role in how you show up in the search engines.

Google just loves any website that can keep visitors engaged, and they tend to favor and then reward you with the manner in which your website presents in the search engine results if you can keep visitors lingering longer than the competition.

Keeping the visitors on your site for an extended period is crucial when you want to be found on the first page of the Google results. This makes sense when it comes to Google ranking your site concerning keywords or keyword phrases. The bottom line is that keeping visitors on your website is a crucial element to organic traffic.

The problem lies in the fact that many website owners do not know how to boost the average time that a visitor stays on the site. Not only that, but many do not have the time to go through trial and error until it is all figured out. Luckily, there are a few ideas that you can use that will help you to keep the visitors that you get on your pages a lot longer.

These are some of the top ways that you can work on keeping your visitors hanging around for a bit:

1. Video

Everyone likes to get drawn in by a good video, especially if the video is relevant to whatever search terms that they plugged into the search engine. Believe it or not, if you have a 30-minute video on your website, you may be able to keep a visitor hanging around for close to 20 minutes on average. When you compare this to the average of around 2 minutes or less that many visitors spend on a site without video, this is a staggering result.

Video works so well because many people today prefer watching over reading, so putting up a video gives them exactly what they want. If you happen to have videos on YouTube, be sure that you are embedding them on your pages so that you are keeping the visitors watching on your site versus YouTube itself. Google will end up rewarding you for keeping your visitors there longer, and it will still count as a view when they watch on your website.

2. Eliminate Fluff

While it may be tempting to jam as much stuff on your main page as possible, the best way to keep people on your website longer is to strategically spread out the information. Most people tend to leave a website when they are inundated and overwhelmed with too much information. Not only that, but balanced information on the main page with links to other informational pages will keep them looking through your website until they gather all of the ‘stuff’ they are looking for.

3. Put The Good Stuff In The Sweet Spot

Also known as putting everything ‘above the fold,’ this is when you have what the visitor wants to see on their screen immediately without them needing to click or scroll down. Some visitors will make a quick decision as to whether they want to linger on your website before they even think about scrolling. Put your best stuff right at the top, and if the visitor likes what they see, the chances are good that they will hang around to sew what else your pages have to offer. Think of it as the main page is the significant promise as to what is to come when they stay.

4. Purple Cow Mentality

The purple cow is a term known for a website that is either memorable or forgettable, totally shareable, or even standing out so much that people cannot help but talk about you. Anyone can see that there are tons of template websites out there today and customers get tired of wading through them. You want to stand out from the crowd, so think about being the purple cow to get people talking about you, sharing your pages and even some of the videos that you have embedded within your pages. No clients are going to be bragging about or referring to the most boring online presence in your area, so have fun and be yourself. Just be sure that you keep a decent balance so that you can stick out without being obnoxious or too outrageous.

5. Keep It Easy To Navigate

This further enhances the rule of keeping your website clean. You need to have a website that is free of clutter, easy to find everything, and free of any broken links so that your visitors can get what they need. You have to think about putting together a funnel of easy to follow links that allow a steady flow so that customers stay around longer. To this day, a website that is easy to navigate is one of the top ways to keep visitors.

6. Keep It Simple And FAST

How many times have you been on a website and were quickly turned off by horrible load times? You need to have a fast site that only takes a few seconds to load, or you are going to lose your viewers. Additionally, Google rewards sites with faster load times, as they are all about enhancing user experience. A slow website will do nothing except hurt your site rankings. An excellent way to ensure faster load times is to upgrade your hosting, which will be something that is well worth the investment in the long run.

7. Make Inter-Site Searching Easy

Second in line after a slow loading website is the frustration users get if they are not able to quickly search for what they need on your website. Always be sure that you have a search bar that is easy to access and use. Easy searching translates into more engagement and more time on your website, which turns into a winning situation for everyone involved.

8. Keep The Website Design Congruent

Having a website that is congruent regarding the look and the feel as well as the overall messaging will be very beneficial. You never want to have different designs and different colors on each page of your website, because you end up creating a disconnect. Visitors should feel that they are on the same page and keeping with the flow. Remain conscious of the look of your website and keeping it congruent will be extremely beneficial.

9. Font And Color Continuity

This goes hand in hand with the point above. You need to be sure that the layout, logos, colors, and font styles mesh well and flow. A mish-mash of fonts, sizes, and colors can create chaos and turn off your visitors. While you may think that such changes will be fresh and edgy, this ends up bothering your visitor’s eyes, and they will lose interest FAST. Keep the color choices clean and try to stick to only three or four colors for a tidy look.

10. Mind Your Hyperlinks

While you may want to try to blend your hyperlinks in with the text on your website, people want to be able to find links quick and easy. Keep all of the hyperlinking easy to find and in the traditional blue format that everyone is familiar with using. It is also a good idea to make sure that you have the classic color change after the link has been clicked so that users don’t end up running around in circles on your website.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that having lingering visitors on your website will be great for ongoing traffic. There are some things that you can be doing to maximize visitor retention. Additionally, you will find that content is king, so always work on quality information that offers good take-aways for all of your readers. Fresh content, clean websites, smart linking, quality videos and regular blogging will work wonders for your website rankings each month. Contact Top Marketing Agency at (888) 843-9840 to learn more about quality website design and what it can do for your business success.

 Begin with the basics: Is your company website mobile responsive? Find out now using our free responsive website testing tool >>