Are you exploring ways to improve your website? If so, then you need to take the right steps to make it more attractive and engaging to users.
You only get one chance to make a first impression with your website. Squandering this will lead to a high bounce rate. Users will leave your site, in search of better options elsewhere. This can translate into countless lost sales for your company.
The good news is that there are simple steps you can take to make your site more engaging. Here are key recommendations.
Content Overview
Understand your customer pain points
Simplify your website architecture
Understand your customer pain points
When customers click on your website for the first time they won’t always know it’s what they’re looking for. You’ll have to prove to them that they have come to the right place. The best way to do this is by showing that you understand their pain points.
A pain point is a problem a customer is facing. For instance, a pain point could be that they have no idea where to find the best lawyers in town. Pain points tend to fall into four categories:
- Financial
- Process
- Productivity
- Support
You can use a customer’s pain point as a jumping-off mark for content. When you create content for your website, you can start by introducing a pain point you know a customer has. Tell a story connected to this idea and then show them why your product or service is the right solution (Read: Positioning and Messaging Framework) . You will immediately have their attention if you provide information to help them solve a problem.
There are numerous ways to identify customer pain points. For instance, you can use the search engines for reviews of a product or search social media channels to discover the issues that customers have with competing brands.
Simplify your website architecture
It should be easy for customers to find what they are searching for on your website. Ideally, your site should follow the three-click rule. This means that a customer should never be more than three clicks away from any page that they are searching for. If your website is difficult to navigate, they will get bored and click away. Usually, a site starts off fine but when a business grows the website gets more complex. Every time you add something new it can damage the website architecture.
You need to keep things as simple as possible. Customers are used to sites with the same types of menus and navigational routes, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Stick to tried and trusted methods.
Improve site speed
How fast should your website load? Anything more than three seconds will cause issues. Users are fickle and will get bored of waiting for an image to appear. There are various options you can explore to improve your site speed.
You can test your website’s load speed through GTmetrix. Usually, if your website is running slowly, it can be due to scripts or animations or images that have very huge file sizes. Compress your images for free through compressor.io.
Sometimes slow loading sites may be due to the hosting service. If you don’t have the right hosting solution, no changes you make will impact the slow speed. That’s why all the websites we build are hosted by Amazon Web Services.
Optimize for mobile devices
Website traffic originating from mobile phones is steadily increasing. The percentage of visitors using desktop computers (or tablets) is reducing. Designing for mobile is a necessity nowadays.
If your website isn’t specifically optimized for phones and tablets, you’ve already lost the user. If you’re starting a website from scratch, you should be thinking in terms of a mobile-first design.
To do this, you need to consider how your website is going to appear on a smaller screen. Remember, it needs to load quickly without any delays. As such, you should take away any unnecessary design ideas to make it light, but at the same time functional.
It’s easy to find out how your site is going to look and feel on a mobile device. You can test it using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. All you need to do is enter your URL and Google will tell you whether your site is mobile friendly.
Avoid long paragraphs
Content is king but only if it’s the right type of content. Research shows that long-form content such as extended blogs will have a positive impact on SEO. However, your content still needs to be divided into small chunks of relevant and easy to read paragraphs.
Over-long paragraphs will kill audience interest because they’ll get lost halfway through. Breaking your content into a greater number of shorter paragraphs will make it easier to read and help keep the audience’s interest. More paragraphs also mean that a reader can skim through and find the points that they are interested in.
Have a clear call to action
If you want users to remain engaged and stay on your website, you need to guide them. Ideally, you should lead users towards a purchase decision or share contact information, in exchange for something useful that solves a very specific problem.
The trick here is the right call to action (CTA). There are many different types of CTAs including:
- Contact us
- Click here
- Sign Up Now
- Learn more
The right CTA will depend on what you want to achieve but it has to be clear. If users aren’t sure how they should proceed, they will lose interest.
A CTA should stand out and essentially work as a digital signpost. It should show users what they need to do next or where they need to go next on your site.
Use the right tools
You need to use the right tools to keep your website engaging. I’ve mentioned image compression and speed test tools above, plus online resources you can use to discover possible customer pain points.
For web design, we use our own website builder that’s powerful, loads fast, easy to customize, and mobile responsive.
Finally, if you want more website visitors to convert to leads, you should try our Website Content Engager. It allows you to discover more about your website visitors, thereby making your conversations more meaningful for them early on. It will also help you create an engaging lead magnet that solves specific problems while appealing to your site visitors’ curiosity.
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