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Web User Engagement: How To Best Engage Your Visitors
Since the early days of the worldwide web, we have always recognized the effectiveness of a website by measuring its online traffic through using webpage views as the standard metric. As time passed, there are many changes that occurred in the digital landscape. Getting traffic to a website is one thing. Many webmasters or website owners are just too focused on getting traffic to their website. However, they neglect one very crucial part of their SEO efforts which is to generate user engagement. So, how do we best engage your website visitors once they arrive or visit your website?
Gone are the days when page view metrics are what webmasters are looking at when measuring the performance of their website(s). Since the algorithm shifts or changes of Google (Panda and Penguin Updates), user engagement metrics have become very important. In order for a website to rank well in major search engines, you have to avoid bounce or the immediate click-back. If you don’t, you will likely plummet from your high search engine rankings (if you are on the first page of SERPs). You don’t only need to attract your clients to your website, but pull them deeper to it. In order to achieve and maintain high SERP rank, you need more genuine engagement.
Now, even if user engagement metrics have no effect on rankings, optimizing your website for effective engagement is always going to be beneficial. The more engaged your clients are to your website, the more influence you are likely to have. You must remember that genuine engagement can result to more leads. More leads mean increase in sales and boost in revenue.
What is User Engagement?
User engagement is the quality of the user experience which emphasizes the positive aspects of the interaction. It is the occurrence linked with being captivated by a web application, like a website, and being motivated to use it. Effective and successful websites are not just used, but they are engaged with. Online users should invest their time and attention to your website.
Today, as user attention becomes a prime resource among webmasters, it is extremely important that websites are designed and optimized to engage user experience. Engagement metrics are commonly used to measure web user engagement. The metrics include number of unique users, click-through rates, page views, and time spent on the website. Although these metrics are used to actually measure web usage, they are used as substitutes for online user engagement. The higher and the more frequent the usage, the more engaged the user is. Websites are compared with the use of these engagement metrics.
You need to understand that user engagement has varied characteristics depending on the web application (for example, engagement of online users to gaming websites is different from that of in a news portal). However, similar engagement metrics are usually used for all types of web applications, regardless of the difference of user experiences.
There are still some ongoing debates on the “right” engagement metrics. However, this doesn’t refute the fact or importance of user engagement. Encouraging user engagement in a website is directed towards attracting potential prospects and not to earn a higher bounce rate. User engagement offers a satisfactory experience so that those who visit your website will translate into customers or evangelists for your brand and online marketing efforts.
How To Best Measure Engagement?
When measuring user engagement, you need to look at the engagement link in Google Analytics. Apart from visit time on the website and pages per visit, common engagement measurements include mentions on Twitter, inbound links, return visits, new users predate range, page depth, and categories of interest. If these metrics increase, it will likely conclude that you are being more engaging to your clients.
However, you need to make certain that these metrics or user engagement (in general) is benefiting you and your business. Your visitors might be spending considerable time on your website, but that may be because they are just lost. You might be getting a number of Twitter and Facebook mentions, but are your website visitors actually buying your products or availing of your services.
Web user engagement must translate into leads, resulting to more sales and profit. The metrics should be aligned with your business goals. When deciding on what engagement metrics to measure, you need to determine whether how this type of engagement metric will help you to achieve your goals and objectives. You need to explore other metrics which could probably be a great help in your business.
How To Increase User Engagement on Your Website
Even with a lot of online traffic, without user engagement, the effort and time spent to send traffic will ultimately go to waste. No one will stay on your website if it has nothing to attract the interest of the visitor. If your website doesn’t contain anything that users are looking for, their visit will not eventually convert into any action.
There are many proven and tested practices to optimize a website for effective user engagement. Here are some rules when optimizing your website for user engagement.
- Make Your Own Success Metrics. You need to determine few, quantifiable measures based around a visitor or user taking a desirable action. You have to link those actions to business returns.
- Less is More. This doesn’t only mean that you reduce choices, but it also means you have to decrease “in your face” techniques.
People are likely to engage when they are only asked to fill in those that are actually the most important, rather that providing too many information that may just be desirable. On the other hand, pop-ups, pop-unders, marquees, splash pages, and other “in your face” techniques are obsolete when it comes to effectively grabbing the attention of users or visitors. They can create bad user experiences. They will not work for the web surfers of today and will eventually back fire, thus creating more problems.
- Employ “Call-To-Action” Words. Yes, words matter. Call to action is the name of the game actually. You need to encourage your visitor or user to take action. It is best to use words to tell your visitor what exactly they have to do. Instead of saying “Free Trial”, you should use “Try It Free.” The latter is an explicit call to action which will likely encourage users to do so.
- Be flexible. You need to try many things out. There are things which will work perfectly. On the other hand, there are some which will not work even if they are logical and rational when you employ them.
Take the chance and the risk. If you fail, you can have the opportunity to make changes. If a technique doesn’t work out, you can stop it immediately and try something else. If it disrupts your SEO campaign or your marketing efforts, dump the technique fast and move on. - Beginning Immediately. It is easy to talk about being engaging and how it can help your business. But, what matters most is taking action to be more engaging.
You can make your website more engaging today. You need to do that right now.
- Select Appropriate Keywords. First and foremost, when you want to drive traffic to your website, you need to ascertain that the keywords leading to your website will match your content.
- Produce Appealing and Relevant Content. You need to remember that anything boring will not create any sort of engagement. With many distractions offline and online, web users are adept in filtering out what they don’t want to use. Boring and dreary content will not do any purpose for your website and your business in general. Keep your users glued to your website by offering them with relevant and attention-grabbing content. If they are hooked to your website, they will likely engage more deeply on your pages and eventually purchase your products or services.
Funny, shocking, opinionated, informative and sad content are generally the popular reads. You need to show them in a concise, clear, and easy to read format so that your users have more than one reason to stay and engage in your web pages.
- Update Your Content. There are two reasons why you need to keep your content fresh. You need to provide content in a timely-manner which is relevant to your web users or visitors. Fresh content is a vital lifeline for your website.
Secondly, the flow of fresh content in your website will have your visitors returning to it. There is always something new when they visit the next time, thus will increase your engagement over time. If the content on your website is not updated, your users will likely not return.
Therefore, fresh content will mean increased and continued engagement.
- Use Visually Rationally. Visuals are more interesting content and can easily be absorb than something that is written out in text. Use images and videos on your website to balance your written content to keep your users engaged.
You need to remember that optimizing your content will also lead to better discovery, consumption, and engagement.
Social Media Engagement
There are many ways to get people to engage, comment, and like your brand on Facebook or reply to a tweet about your service. However, you need to realize that the target of marketing in social media platforms is receiving a lot of likes of replies/retweets. The ultimate target of is sales and of course profits.
Driving social media engagement can be beneficial for your company and brand. However, many online entrepreneurs utilize social media and employ social media tactics, yet don’t show much respect to their users.
The first rule of is to be active. If you need users to interact with your brand or business on Twitter or Facebook, you need to tweet or post regularly. Your users will see your social media presence and use it as an avenue to air their complaints and ask for customer service question. If you don’t answer customer questions or complaints, you are sending the wrong message towards your client. They may think that you are neglecting them or think that their query is irrelevant.
Now, users don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t like to be pressured. If you post on your Facebook page with the phrase “Like us if..”, you are totally telling the users what to do. You should want people to literally like your content and not tell them to like it.
You must remember that you try to drive social media engagement to broaden your brand awareness, drive sales, and ultimately earn more profit. For an effective social media engagement, you need tp provide your users with something to engage with. The content you share on social media platforms must be relevant to your users and of course, to you.
2013-04-12 13:49:21
Source: http://www.newblood.com/blog/web-user-engagement-how-to-best-engage-your-visitors/
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