Visitor Retention. 5 “Must Do” Actions To Keep Your Visitors And The Search Engines Happy

Paul Rone-Clarke SEO Expert is happy to share the following.

Do you think visitors leave your landing page too quickly? Do you have any idea why this is happening? It’s simple. Today, consumers or readers like websites that provide reliable, readable, visually appealing, latest and valuable information.

Visitor Retention And Visitor Activity Are Now Estimated To Represent 20% Of Your SEO Ranking Potential In Google

Whisk back in time to a simpler age when most web users didn’t know how to search and were quite happy to spend hours looking for the information they needed or product they wanted to buy. The search terms they used were crude, the results presented by the engines were average (at best) and the experience was, in comparison to today, pretty slow.

But it was accepted 15 years ago because the alternative was a trip to the library for information or to the shopping mall to buy stuff. Just being able to learn what you wanted and buy what you needed from the comfort of your armchair was enough of an improvement over the alternative to make even the relatively poor results search engines provided back before the millennium seem like a giant step forward.

Times change, and web users learned to refine the search terms they used to give a better and more immediate match. Search engines responded by tailoring the results to give the user a better experience.

The Present Day

But what is a better experience and how is it measured?

Simple really. The SE’s now look at your website visitors behaviour and decide based n certain metrics whether your site is offering them what they want or not.

For example.

Good indicators might include;

• A long time spent on a site
• Links clicked on your site
• Pages visited on the site.
• Did they download anything from the site?

The list of contra indicators would be the reverse of these things. Visitors leaving within seconds, visitors not engaging with content. Visitors not clicking anywhere or visiting other pages. These things are bad news.

And They Are Being Measured By Google

Your site doesn’t even need to have tracker code on it for Google to work out most of the key metrics. It does it via tracking the IP address of the searcher. If they return to the search engine looking for another result in just a few seconds? Then Google assumes they didn’t find what they wanted on your site… and that’s bad news. It can and will affect your ranking.

Enter “Retention”

Getting visitors to stay can be done in various ways. Even a simple HTML site with little to engage can be a winner of the written content on it is stellar. But in general, for most of us looking to build effective multi media sites, there are a number of things we can do to improve the user experience and likely improve our sites own performance in SE rankings.

Here are the five most important things you can do to improve your websites visitor retention.

Improve content readability, get rid of Popups, build an attractive brand story, create multiple landing pages with high value keywords and develop a mobile friendly site.

Let’s now see how these factors play an important role.

Improve Content Readability

Don’t write a large chunk of text. They are visually discouraging. Please avoid this lousy formatting. It drives away the visitors. Write the texts in an easy to read format.

Keep the background color of the page light. Font and size of the text should be large enough to not put stress on the eyes. If readers have to struggle to find out the words or texts on a web page, that’s not a good sign.

Keep the page layout simple and neat. There should be enough space between the write up and the side bar. A space between the menu and the header is also desirable. You’ve to make sure that what you write on the web page is comfortably visible and readable to the visitors.

Another great thing you can do is trying to reduce the texts, and add infographic or graphical images to the page instead. Check out the blog posts of high ranking information sites to see what they are doing these days. You’ll find many now add interesting images and infographics to their posts which look attractive besides the fact that they are also highly informative.

Consider redesigning your web pages. Or else, the chances that visitors will quickly leave your landing page will always be high. The section below describes what you can do regarding the landing pages so that you can increase visitor retention.

Create Multiple Landing Pages

One of the five important things you can do to improve your websites visitor retention is creating multiple landing pages with high value keywords. This strategy will also increase the click through rate of your site.

A Google Analytics study will tell you that most of the times visitors return from the landing page or from the entrance. So you’ll have to spend more time and energy to design the landing or home page.

When you create the landing pages, make them easy to navigate. Creating an optimized and high converting landing page is not too hard as now you can get pre made templates from some sources like Unbounce, Onepagelove and Instapage.

Also, please create variety and attractive call to actions for the landing pages. Learn how to create attractive landing pages. Many marketing departments in companies don’t even know how to set up the landing pages.

Make Site Mobile Friendly

The third most important thing to do is making the website very adaptable to the smart devices. If you can do that, visitor retention on your website will increase encouragingly.

It’s no surprise to know that a major chunk of visitors come from mobile devices. Statistically, 40 per cent of the total global YouTube views originate from mobile. 68 per cent of the total Facebook likes originate via mobiles. 88 per cent of photo shares and uploads on twitter come from mobile.

So, it says that you just can’t ignore this important factor anymore. By making your site mobile friendly, you can reduce bounce rate drastically. These are well proven facts.

Read the success story of the major travel companies who were dealing with catastrophically high bounce rates before introducing mobile friendly web pages. In some cases they could reduce bounce rate to almost 35 per cent after making their website mobile friendly. Google also favors the websites that take care of this part attentively.

To check your site’s mobile friendliness, go to the mobile friendly test tool from Google, plug in your website URL and click the Analyze button. You will get to see the result. If your site is not mobile responsive, its search engine rank and traffic will automatically drop.

Eliminate the Popups

If you want users to stay on your landing pages for longer, you’ll have to avoid the popups. A user experience study conducted in 2013 revealed that 70 per cent of the visitors found the popups very annoying.

Most people don’t like them. Aggressive use of the popups can drive away the visitors. Yes, it’s true that sometimes these popups work and they helps to grow email lists. But, for long term result, which will give you more number of organic visitors, you’ll have to totally avoid them.

Statistically speaking, if 14 per cent consumers consider responding positively to the popups, 51 per cent will respond better to the email offers. If you can get rid of them completely, it will improve your site’s user experience.

Create an Attractive Brand Story

Develop a very attractive brand story telling for the target audience. Customers love good stories and remember them for longer.

Beautiful images can accompany your content or texts. Develop a story where customers will be given a prominent identity. Copyblogger is a great example of that. You will find great tips on how to write brand or marketing stories there.

Just remember to be truthful when you write a storytelling. An effective brand storytelling can improve your brand image and make your website and company a star. Your customers wouldn’t like if you lie to them. It will extensively hurt your business credibility.

The point here is that if you want to do something, try to do it honestly. When you want to build a site, build it. But, give your heart and soul to make it just perfect and meaningful. Don’t waste your time and energy.

So, if you want the readers to love your website, do everything that you’ve to do. We told you the five most important things you can do to improve your websites visitor retention. Research more and figure out what additionally can be done. Digital marketing is evolving fast. You may find something new and effective.

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